Big Challenges Ahead For Linda Yaccarino As She Gears Up To Take Over As Twitter CEO

In about five weeks, Linda Yaccarino will take over the role of Twitter CEO, replacing the world's second-richest person Elon Musk. In the past seven months since its $44 billion takeover by Elon Musk, Twitter has seen lots of ups and downs, which make it a challenging road ahead for the incoming CEO.

Amidst the many U-turns and failed promises in the seven-month tenure of Elon Musk to date, the incoming CEO Linda has her work cut out for her. Listed below are some of the biggest challenges for Linda Yaccarino as gets ready to take on the role of Twitter's CEO.

Big Challenges For Linda Yaccarino

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Appoint content moderation council

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Twitter's outgoing CEO Musk had said he would establish a ¡°content moderation council¡± to advise him on controversial decisions. But the council, even to date, has never been established. Under Musk, Twitter has also removed bans on dozens of accounts including Neo-Nazis, and disbanded the platform¡¯s already-existing Trust and Safety Council, which consisted of civil society groups.

Now, the incoming CEO Linda needs to establish this council, for which she even had a discussion with Musk last month.

In April, Linda and Musk had met for an on-stage conversation at a marketing convention in Miami Beach, Florida. The Miami discussion was cordial, although both of them drew some distinct lines in the sand. On a few occasions, Yaccarino steered the conversation toward issues of content moderation and the apparent proliferation of hate speech and extremism since Musk took over the platform.

Now it remains to be seen what plan Linda has regarding this and whether she is able to implement that, in the presence of Elon Musk as Twitter's CTO (chief technology officer).

Also Read: From Mass Layoffs To Merger-What Went Wrong At Twitter Under Musk

Bring back advertisers

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Soon after Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter, several brands, both big and small, confirmed a pause in advertising on the social networking platform. This came after civil society organisations reportedly raised new concerns over the direction of the company under its new CEO, Elon Musk.

The move led to a massive drop in revenue for Twitter, regarding which Musk tweeted that ¡°Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They¡¯re trying to destroy free speech in America."

In just one month since Musk's takeover, Twitter had already lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers. These companies reportedly had paid Twitter over $255 million since 2020.

While Musk has claimed that advertisers are slowly coming back to Twitter, the task for Linda still remains big enough. In April's conversation with Elon Musk, Linda had couched her questions in the context of whether Musk could help advertisers feel more welcome on the platform.

At one point, she reportedly asked if Musk was willing to let advertisers "influence" his vision for Twitter, explaining that it would help them get more excited about investing more money - "product development, ad safety, content moderation - that's what the influence is."

Musk shut her down. "It's totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places, but it is not cool to try to say what Twitter will do," he said. "And if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount."

Also Read: Timeline Of Elon Musk-Twitter's $44 Billion Deal

Trim down frequent Twitter outages

In the past few months, various media reports have claimed that Twitter's outages have increased since Musk took over, with at least six of them occurring this year alone. A recent outage that happened in early March was among the biggest ones at Twitter. When Twitter users clicked on links, they saw an error message saying that their "current API plan does not include access to this endpoint." While most users struggled with Twitter and its sister service TweetDeck, it was unclear why Twitter has been experiencing a flurry of issues that cause disruptions in service.

Are you wondering what could have caused this? Remember when Twitter said that it was shutting down free access to the Twitter application programming interface (API), making it a premium feature? API essentially allows computer programmes to interact with each other and is also responsible for automated bots (the funny ones) on Twitter. This change also meant no third-party clients for Twitter.

According to Platformer, it's this change that disrupted Twitter services last night. The company has been working on a paid API for developers, but with only one site reliability engineer on site, all thanks to Elon Musk's drastic cuts. It appears that the engineer made a "bad configuration change" on that day that ended up "[breaking] the Twitter API," an employee told Platformer. The problem with such things is that even a "small API change [can have] massive ramifications," Musk tweeted later.

Now Twitter's incoming CEO Linda has her task cut out, with frequent Twitter outages being a big challenge she needs to solve as quickly as possible.

When Linda Questioned Elon Musk About His Tweets

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During their conversation last month, Musk went on to acknowledge that feedback is important and suggested Twitter should aim for a "sensible middle ground" that ensures the public "has a voice" while advertisers focus on the ordinary work of improving sales and the perception of their brands.

He also didn't pass up the opportunity to sell the assembled marketers a new plan to solve Twitter's problems with objectionable tweets, which the company had announced recently. Musk called the policy "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach," describing it as a way to limit the visibility of hate speech and similar problems without actually removing rule-breaking tweets.

Yaccarino took a swing. "Does it apply to your tweets?" Musk has a history of posting misinformation and occasionally offensive tweets, often in the early morning hours.

Musk acknowledged that it does, adding that his tweets can also be tagged with "community notes" that provide additional context to tweets. He added that his tweets receive no special boosts from Twitter, as per AP.

"Will you agree to be more specific and not tweet after 3 a.m.?" Yaccarino asked, "I will aspire to tweet less after 3 a.m.," Elon Musk replied.

Linda Yaccarino's Tweet After Becoming Twitter CEO

I see I have some new followers?...? I¡¯m not as prolific as @elonmusk (yet!), but I¡¯m just as committed to the future of this platform.

Your feedback is VITAL to that future. I¡¯m here for all of it.

Let¡¯s keep the conversation going and build Twitter 2.0 together!

¡ª Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) May 13, 2023

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