The new Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino, has released a new memo to Twitter employees, according to the Wall Street Journal. In it, she displays her vision for Twitter “2.0” as one committed to accurate and timely news, with an overwhelming emphasis on free speech.
Yaccarino went on to say that she had full faith in Elon Musk’s leadership at Twitter based on his record in the aerospace and electric vehicle industries. Musk had previously said that he would focus his efforts within Twitter on launching new products, leaving the overall day-to-day management to his new CEO.
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, he has dramatically trimmed staffing down from 8,000 to 1,500. This has yielded great savings for the company and in the process reveled that much of Twitter’s workforce was not productive. However, the pace for other changes such as Twitter Blue has also shown that product releases need a lot more focused effort to be rolled out smoothly.
Twitter’s valuation post-Musk has already suffered greatly due to uncertainty in its advertisement revenue. Fake tweets by company impersonators had already hurt the value of stocks, such as an incident where a Twitter account posing as Eli Lilly said that insulin would be given free of charge.
Twitter’s new free speech policy has also had difficulties dealing with edge cases, such as the continued banning of Infowar’s Alex Jones. The community notes function, which serves as a crowdsourced fact-checking guide, has generally been received positively, correcting falsehoods on both the Left and the Right. Twitter’s experiment in allowing free speech while maintaining an accurate record will show whether both values can coexist in the same app.
