“Something like that,” Yaccarino said on stage. She pulled out her phone like she was going to double check the number, then got sidetracked by a long answer.
Later, she threw out as examples 540 million monthly active users and 225 million daily active users without quite committing to them being real figures.
Roth said his advice to her was to think about the risks of working with Musk and “what she might face.”
To Yaccarino, having safety concerns comes with the territory of being a CEO. “I feel great. I’m well protected,” she said. Yaccarino said she appreciated his concerns. “I think that’s just a human emotion when you get thrust into such a public spotlight.”
The house is packed right now for Yaccarino’s interview, particularly after the surprise of Roth’s appearance. She opens the conversation with a response to Roth, saying that his Twitter was “operating on a different sets of rules ... ideologies that were creeping down the road of censorship.”
She doesn’t exactly engage with Roth’s assertion that X is doing less to stop harassment on the platform.
“It’s a new day at X,” Yaccarino said. “And I’ll leave it at that.”
She’s speaking with CNBC senior media and tech correspondent Julia Boorstin.
There’s a lot to discuss — for one, the ongoing chaos of working with Elon Musk and transforming Twitter into X. But also, two events just today.
Twitter’s former trust and safety leader, Yoel Roth, was on stage less than an hour ago discussing how Musk sent harassment his way. Also today, Media Matters came out with a report about X placing NFL ads on accounts of white nationalists. That’s a big ding in Yaccarino’s promise that X is brand safe.
She’ll wrap up Code Conference 2023. See you then.
Verge EIC Nilay Patel asked whether the company is as “dependent on Nvidia as everybody else.” Adobe’s Still didn’t answer the question directly, but she suggested the company needs more than one GPU partner.
“I would say we’re certainly using a lot of GPU server capacity,” she says. Of course, “Nvidia’s a great partner,” she caveats.
To CEO Linda Yaccarino: “Look at what your boss did to me,” he says, referring to Musk’s tweets opening him up to death threats. “I hope she is thinking about what those risks are and what she might face.
To Musk: “There are still people within Twitter who care about the platform, who care about making thoughtful, principled, data-backed decisions for Twitter’s users. Listen to them, give them space, don’t overrule them.”
Roth says he’s worried about the lawsuit trying to stop government agencies from working with platforms on moderation.
“It’s a chilling effect,” he said. Even with parts of the original ruling overturned, the communications haven’t started up again, he said. “The strategy works even when it loses in court.”
He sees a similar chilling effect happening across the tech landscape. “It’s what they’re doing to academics, folks working in government, to platforms themselves,” he says of people trying to stop content moderation.
They started after Musk implied that Roth had advocated for sexualizing children — an obviously untrue statement.
Shortly afterward, his address was published online. “I had to sell my house. I had to move,” Roth said. “I bounced between a couple of different places for a few months and then lived in a temporary apartment for a while while I tried to figure out where to land next.”
Roth says there was “overwhelming pressure to change” the platform. “Maybe that pressure would prove to be positive in the long run. My experience was that it wasn’t,” Roth said.
He expected there to be constraints on what Twitter could strip away in terms of safety. But the company didn’t “behave rationally.” And so things have gotten worse.