On with Kara Swisher - The Yoel Roth-Linda Yaccarino Showdown

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

On Wednesday, two Twitter-related interviews rocked the stage at the 2023 Code Conference. Kara interviewed the former head of trust and safety at Twitter/X, Yoel Roth, and Julia Boorstin, CNBC's Senior Media & Tech Correspondent, interviewed X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino.  The late booking of Roth rattled Yaccarino, and her interview led to a media storm. Today, we bring you both interviews. We start off with Kara and Nayeema, as they set the stage early on Wednesday morning, play the interviews in chronological order and then rejoin Kara and Nayeema for a debrief to address accusations that the schedule change amounted to “sandbagging” Yaccarino. (Kara’s response: it does not). Questions or comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza To join the waitlist for the 2024 Code Conference, visit https://voxmediaevents.com/code2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new Reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature. Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naima Raza.

I am jet-lagged and on London time, and you are in California time. Yes, I am. Because after claiming you were done with the Code Conference, Kara, there you are, back again like the Backstreet Boys. No, I just, they asked me to do one or two interviews, and I'm being nice to Vox Media because it's been nice to me. So they requested my presence, and here I am being supportive. How does that feel for your character? You know, it's weird to be, you know, it's different. It's different, and I can't lie.

It's weird, and it's, at the same time, I was glad to finish off 20 years of really spectacular programming, half of which was with Walt Mossberg, or most of which, 15, whatever, 15 years. And so it was good. I feel good about the accomplishments. It's a lot of memories. And I think really spectacular programming for a long, long time. I was thinking that you must have been, like, it must be, you must miss Walt, even in the few years you did code without Walt, must have missed Walt, right?

Yeah, I really did. What a great partner he was, and always took, you know, edgy stands on everything. Like, he was really an entrepreneur. And an entrepreneur. He taught me in many ways to be an entrepreneur. We were always taking risks and doing, why can't we do that? That was really a great person to be able to use. Especially as a powerful man, he was really supportive and always there for you. I think if you had to pick a mentor, I couldn't have picked a powerful man. He was really supportive and always there for you. And I think, you know, if you had to pick a mentor, I couldn't have picked a better one. Yeah. Even for me, he's been very helpful and very supportive in my career in the little time. He's a lot of people he's helped. It was a good partnership. We really handed the baton over in a lot of ways. So Vox is still doing the Code Conference. And this year, the kind of spearheading it are Casey Newton of Platformer, Nilay Patel from The Verge, and Julia Borsten of CNBC fame. And in just a little bit, you'll be heading to the Code stage because Julia Borsten, CNBC's senior media and tech correspondent, is going to interview Linda Iaccarino, the CEO of X slash Twitter. This is probably the biggest, I would say, interview of Code this year. Yeah, could be. Yeah, there's been some good ones here. Yeah, I mean, she's obviously, she's done one or two interviews already, which I thought were

talking points the entire time. But we'll see if Julia can shake her loose. I mean, she's very careful about what she says. I will note it took three people to replace me, but that's okay. But they, you know, she's going to be a tough interview because she's, you know, she's highly controlled and she's under the thumb of Elon Musk, no matter how you, she's not the CEO. I think most people don't think she is. But before Julia talks to Linda, you'll be interviewing Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter and a visiting scholar at UPenn. Importantly, Linda and Yoel never crossed pads at Twitter, now X. But it will be interesting to hear the juxtaposition between those two because, you know, they have a very different relationship with

Elon Musk, though Linda might find herself one day on the other side of the spectrum. I think that's exactly where Linda's going to find herself one day. Yeah. And this isn't the first time you've had two people at two ends of the pole at the conference, right? No. So we put Yoel there because we thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition. And also because we did a great interview with Yoel last year. And so we want to sort of update. And he's been writing a lot on the topic of misinformation, the elections coming up. And to juxtapose them is really important. We did that a lot at All Things D and at Code to try to show different points of view, especially competing ones. We did that a lot at All Things D and at Code to try to show different

points of view, especially competing ones. We sometimes had them on the stage together. For a couple of years, I had people who didn't like each other on the stage together. There were a couple where they argued pretty much. But the best was the 2007 one that you guys, that you and Walt had, Eric Schmidt and the Viacom CEO. Philippe Daumann. And they had been involved in a lawsuit that was that copyright lawsuit, essentially, that they eventually settled for nothing, really. That Viacom was waging against Google at the time and Eric was running it. And so, you know, we thought it would be good to have them near each other, exactly right after each other. I forget which one was first.

What happened there? Who was running away from who and the Philippe and Eric one? Eric was trying to track down Philippe and Philippe ran to the bathroom so he didn't have to see him in the green room. He was very, the PR person from Viacom was super nervous. I can't remember who it was, but it was super nervous. And Kara, did you give Brad crumbs and help him find him? I did.

I told Eric, he's in the men's bathroom. I'll go with you. I just wanted to see the encounter. It was so ridiculous because, you know, they wanted to protect, you know, PR people always want to protect the CEO because they get yelled at if they don't. But, you know, and Philippe didn't want to go on with him. He didn't. Eric loved it. Eric relished the fight. And, you know, he wanted to, he thought about leaving. That was the risk. We didn't care. I kind of have an attitude of don't let the door hit you on the way out if you feel like leaving.

And it's a better story for us. And as much as I want to get an interview, if people leave, it shows a lot about their character and their leadership. Yeah, and I have to say, we booked Yoel pretty last minute due to the cancellation of Mary Barra because of the United Auto Workers strike. He happened to be in L.A., which was good. And for a second, people were worried. Some of our colleagues were worried, myself included, by the way, that Linda would pull out. But I got a hand to her. She was a pro.

I guess, yeah. Was what Julia was. I have a different attitude, as you know. If they pull out, they pull out. That's their decision. It's not ours to, I just think these people are CEOs. They're highly paid, and they should be able to handle anything that comes their way.

I think the press in general, sometimes the tech press is famous for coddling CEOs. And, you know, we've been debating access journalism around Walter Isaacson. And I think sometimes it's good to have access, and I've had plenty of access. But at the other times, you just have to hold firm and do the toughest interview you can that's fair. Yeah, and I think that Julia Borsten will do that with Linda Iaccarino. This is a weird situation where there's a last minute change in the schedule and, you know, PR people could yank someone if they didn't want to do it. We didn't have John Greenblatt, you know, bungee in from the ceiling. So that's not an ambush. It's not too late. I know. I could call him. I just think we really, and the press,

we can throw anything we want at people and they should be able to take it. Yeah. And I think she's savvy, by the way. Pulling out of an interview is actually giving the media a better story. And it's denying the audience a newsworthy interview. I know it sounds crazy, but I think she likes the attention. She's wanted to be CEO. And so she likes the role. And now let's see if she's up to the task of talking about the company in a way that isn't apologetic constantly for Elon. Though just this week there was a profile of her at an FT where it comes to light that she was blindsided by Elon's tweet announcing her hire, which prompted her to rush out of a meeting and go tell her boss, Michael Kavanaugh, that she was going to have to put a notice, basically. Yeah, that's been reported previously. But yeah, he just did it as usual.

He does whatever he wants. And NBC people definitely did not know she was talking to them, although they could have seen my tweet. It's her. So I don't know. She should have probably been in touch with them, but I don't know if she cares. I think she felt that they were not giving her her due there when, you know, names were being bandied about for the CEO to replace Jeff Schell, who left under ignominious circumstances. Oh, is that what we call it? Ignominious circumstances?

Yes, that's the word. Some concerns of harassment during his tenure over at NBCU. Concerns, yeah. Yeah, concerns. I gotta say, I don't know if I'd want to work with someone who jammed me the way that Elon jammed her on that announcement. I think that's the whole relationship. That's the whole, it's just jamming? He himself is ignominious, which is defined by deserving or causing public disgrace or

shame. That's his specialty, ignominious behavior. But Elon, of course, still holds on to the tech, the product side, the stack of Twitter. So it's a little bit like Linda. Some people have said she's a COO, not a CEO. I call her, yeah, a CEO in name only, a sign-out. A sign-out. I would agree.

We'll see what she says. I like Linda. As I've said many times, I thought she was an excellent ad salesperson at NBC. I thought she ran it really well and is a really interesting person. But I sure am going to be interested to see what she says to Julia when pressed. Julia will do great. But first, you're going to interview Yoel Roth on the stage. What are you going to press him on? It's been nine months since you last interviewed him. Yeah, well, he left Twitter at that time, and we talked about why he left. And he's a very solid and fact-oriented guy, and so he gave a really solid interview about it. But after that happened, Elon really attacked him and essentially insinuated that he was—I don't want to repeat it, but he said he had an issue with a research paper he wrote about young people and sexual activity. And he insinuated he was a pedophile.

Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. Yael Roth has come under fire from both Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Twitter. He's in some way been kind of called out, doxed, you know, subject of much interest from Kellyanne Conway to many people on the right. And that has sent him into a pretty precarious life. He's been very much in hiding or on the run. Well, the hiding only came after Elon did this. And it was untrue. It was untrue and falsely accused him of things. And, you know, he did it in his typical fashion, which you're seeing in the same stuff with the ADL, which is it's a dog whistle. But in this case, it was quite dangerous. And Yoel published an op-ed in The Times last week.

He describes how he's had to sell his house, move repeatedly, hire armed security guards in order to protect his family. And he makes an argument that these personalized attacks that he's seen in his life and other people like Alex Stamos and Rene DiResta at Stanford Internet Observatory have seen in the face of lawsuits filed against them, that those are not just, you know, random incidents, that these are part of a coordinated effort to silence, to stun, to clamp down on scrutiny. Yeah, I think he's right. I think that's what they're doing. The free speech people don't want people to speak. These lawsuits are particularly vexing for academics who are working on really important misinformation. And of course, there's the cases of the government can talk to social media sites. It's a full-scale attack on

people calling attention to misinformation, because for some, misinformation is very useful, such as Donald Trump and his minions. And so, you know, and they're using the banner of free speech to create a really dangerous situation. And so we'll talk about that and a lot more. more. Yeah. I think one thing that's interesting about that also is that he's kind of, often we look at elections in this country, we think in the States, oh, we're so much better than other places. He draws line in this op-ed where he talks about Modi's India, where police show up knocking at a Twitter employee's house, and countries where there are these hostage laws that require social media companies to employ folks in a home country so they can have more control over them. And he's saying, hey, look, things aren't much better in the U.S. The mechanism here isn't the police. It's these powerful men using a cultural mob, lawsuits. And we have to figure it out before a big election. I think he's right. I think Yoel is a honorable person. And I think he has a lot to say. And

given what he's been through, it's a really good time to talk to him, especially, you know, in comparison to Linda Iaccarini, who's trying to turn it around. talk to him, especially, you know, in comparison to Linda Iaccarini, who's trying to turn it around. There are kind of two flaws that I think are worth it, or two important caveats I think are worth addressing in his piece. He says this isn't cancel culture, but it does have some parallels because he says it's a right-wing strategy when, in fact, on the left, we see cancellation, suppression, you know, people being shamed by online mobs, whether it's Victoria's Secret Karen or anyone else on the internet. And then two, we talk a lot about naming and shaming executives. We've talked about this with Casey Newton, Kara, and our reporting. And I think

there is a conversation about if it's fine to do to the CEO, is it fine to do to someone who's making big content moderation decisions or putting making the decision to fact check a president i think that's nonsense i'm sorry i just think it does i think it's because this is okay since seriousness happens obviously on the left but this is a strategic plan in order to shut down um academic research it never happens. And this is some professor saying something crazy at a college. Well, you know, I don't put it in the same list as the Stanford Internet Observatory people not being able to speak to reporters anymore, or the government not being able to alert people to really dangerous stuff. And that's, it's a very big difference.

Well, I hope you'll ask Yoel the question, because I'll be curious to hear his response as well. Yes. Anyways, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with your code interview with Yoel Roth. And then stick around because after that, we're going to play Julia Boorstin's interview with Linda Iaccarino. And we'll end with a debrief. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.

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We also coordinated our outfit. Always. This is like nutty. I aspire to dress like a stylish lesbian. Yes, and you've done it. And once again, you've done it. Anyway, how are you doing? I'm all right. So you were the last minute add-to and a replacement for actually...

For Mary Barra uh who's the ceo of gm she was busy so how's the strike negotiations going no wait wrong question um uh i'm excited you're here and i did you were in happen to be in los angeles and we were going to do another interview so it worked out perfectly um we did an interview in late 2022, about a year ago, when you left Twitter. And it was a month before you left, Elon Musk, who's the owner of Twitter, tweeted, I recommend following YoYoEl for the most accurate understanding of what's happening with trust and safety at Twitter. But you left for a number of reasons soon after that, within a month.

And I remember when you were on the call, I think I described it on Pivot like a hostage crisis. But anyway, leaving that aside, you said to me, I was weighing the pros and cons of an ongoing basis. I knew my limits were.

And by the time I chose to leave, I realized that even if I spent all day, every day trying to avert whatever next disaster there was going to be, the ones that got through, there were ones that got through. And blue verification got through over written advice prepared by my team and others at Twitter. We knew that what was going to happen is not that it was a surprise. It failed in exactly the ways we said it would. I'd like you to reflect on that now about what you were thinking at the time, because I think you were surprised and disappointed. Yeah. You know, when I left Twitter, I reflected on nearly eight years at the company and really on what had been my dream job.

Like, I can truthfully say I had a job that was hard. I had a job that exacted some significant consequences, but it was a job I would pick over any other if I could still pick now. And you stayed in the transition for people, though. You stayed. Go ahead. I did. And I stayed because I cared about the platform. I cared about the role that it plays in the world. I'm sure many of us in this room were Twitter addicts. And I thought the platform was significant for the future of humanity and democratic deliberation. I also came to realize that there was only so much that one person or a team of people could do at the company in the face of overwhelming pressure to change it. And

maybe that pressure would prove to be positive in the long run, but my experience was that it wasn't, and that at a certain point, I was taking personal costs for decisions that were made against my advice, against my team's advice, and really against common sense. When I left Twitter shortly before you and I spoke last time, I wrote an essay in the New York Times where I was like, look, don't panic, everyone. There's all these factors that are going to constrain what happens next at Twitter. I said, it's going to be advertisers. Surely Elon doesn't want to burn this $44 billion asset that he just bought to the ground. So he doesn't want to chase away the advertisers. There's no way. He won't do it. I was wrong on that front. 60% of advertisers left and haven't come back. That's a problem. Then I was like, all right, forget advertisers. There's going to be

regulatory pressure. The Digital Services Act in Europe is now in force. They can penalize platforms 6% of their global revenue for noncompliance. I was like, they're not going to screw with that. 6% is a massive, nope, I was wrong. Twitter withdrew from the disinformation code of practice in Europe. They're the only large platform to do so. And Commissioner Yarova has said that Twitter are tempting fate, that they are an easy target for enforcement. And so, all right, I was wrong on that point as well.

And then the third one, I was like, you know, they're not going to mess with the app stores. That one was more complicated, because I gather that Elon and Tim Cook went for a walk in Cupertino, and everything is now kind of copacetic. expecting a company that would play by the rules and pursue its self-interest. That was the company that I had known for eight years. And that's sort of how we expect large businesses to operate. And that's not what happened at all. All right, let's talk about what happened because you, it was a troubled business. Let's speak, I make this point out, they had issues around advertising, they had issues around size, around innovation, about fast moving. Mark Zuckerberg actually just addressed that in an interview, which we'll get to in a minute. And he said exactly what we all said. This is not innovating fast enough.

So there were definite... When he took over, I thought, oh, finally, someone's going to change something. I had exactly the same. And we exchanged a number of emails that were very hopeful about what was going to change and you stayed so you decided to stay but you also said um you refused to lie one of the you had things that you were going to do you refused to lie and that one of my limits was

if twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy there's no longer need for me or my role or doing what I do. This is the reason you left, correct? It is. Twitter was not perfect. It was flawed for all of the reasons you pointed out. And I would add another really big one, which is it had giant safety and security problems. I did the work that I was doing because I wanted to try to improve them. But Twitter was always a platform that was sort of constraining itself and governing itself according to a set of rules and principles, imperfect, but ones that we were striving to perfect. There was always something we could point to that said, this is how we are operating. And then all of a sudden,

that didn't exist anymore. There was just sort of direction coming from above about what to do. The first day after the acquisition, there was the directive to change the logged out experience on Twitter, just a product change out of nowhere. Do it in 24 hours. Why should we do it? Just do it. And the team did. But that was a warning sign. Then it was And the team did. But that was a warning sign. Then it was reinstate some of these accounts. And I managed to talk Elon out of doing that, but it was a directive and that worried me. And we've seen it more and more in the months since. We've seen that the company makes impetuous decisions about banning journalists for talking about the location of Elon Musk's plane, and then it reinstates them, sort of,

and then it blocks links. No, that guy's over on threads now, but go ahead. All of this reads to me like a company that has abandoned the rule of law, not just the laws of the land, like the Digital Services Act, but also the laws that it imposed on itself, the operating principles that guided it as a company. Which some criticize. We'll get to those things. But you also told me one way of streamlining the work of trust and safety, I guess, is to have fewer rules, which you're saying. What's been the result of that in your

estimation in terms of what's gotten worse? Is there a good reason for doing it? You know, I think Twitter comms are really terrified that I'm here to trash the company right before their CEO gets on stage. I promise I'm not. I deal in facts, right? I'm a university professor. Let's talk about facts. By the way, I'm sorry. They can all handle it. So go ahead. I would hope so. They're paid the big bucks. They want the title. Turns out university life is not as financially lucrative. Right. So no, let's look at the evidence. Turns out university life is not as financially lucrative. So no, let's look at the evidence. We have seen just this week a study out from researchers in Europe talking about the prevalence and spread of disinformation across all of the major platforms.

I will give you one guess which platform has the highest degree of spread. It's Twitter. We have also seen research that suggests that the prevalence of hate speech and abuse on the platform is higher. By any measure, it's worse. Except by Twitter's measures. So let's actually talk about those, right? So Twitter partnered with a company called Sprinklr, and they put out a study in May talking about the prevalence of English language hate speech on Twitter. And their data was impressions on English language hate speech are three one thousandths of a percent of impressions on Twitter. Like, wow, what a tiny number. That sounds amazing. Let's

break down what that actually means. So first, this is a completely non-auditable number, right? We are talking about data shared in private between Twitter and one of its partners. This is data about the number of views that a tweet gets, data that nobody can confirm, and it's made available on a privileged basis from Twitter to a select partner whose existence as a company is dependent on continued access to Twitter. That seems to me like a slight conflict of interest, but like, fine, let's set that aside. Don't worry about it. Second, the study is saying impressions on hate speech. This is based on a machine learning model that predicts if something is hate speech. Is the model good? Is it bad? What was it trained on? What are its biases? We don't know. Peer review is a pain in the ass. Every academic will tell

you that. But the reason that it exists is so you can answer these questions in a satisfying, empirical way. You can say, if we're talking about hate speech, it is defined in a rigorous way. We don't know that about Twitter's data. There's simply no way to know. So you don't have the ability, so that this is an issue. So what, you've been pointing out these things, and including in story pieces in the New York Times and various places, and speaking out. But after you left November 10th, Elon's attitude towards you changed very significantly. And he put you, I would say, in deep harm by mischaracterizing a paper you wrote long ago. Explain what you wrote and what he did.

Yeah. So long, long ago, when I was a graduate student, I was studying dating apps. And I was writing pretty critically about the trust and safety efforts that some of these platforms employed. Specifically, I was writing about the gay dating app Grindr. And I said, look, even if this app says it is only for people who are 18 and over, we all know that kids lie.

And even if platforms really, really wish that nobody under the age of 18 would sign up for them, they obviously will. And so platforms have a responsibility to deal with that. You have to live in the real world, not the imagined world. This is a problem shared by Facebook and many others. Everyone. This is just a statement about the reality of the internet and the responsibility that platforms have to deal with it. And so what I wrote was very simple. I said, don't pretend that this policy is enough.

Recognize your responsibility to protect kids and build a platform that can be safe for them. Don't expect that no kids will be there. Expect that they will be there and that you need to create an experience that is safe for them regardless of that fact. And a separate space. Yeah. No different than Kids to Ram for Kids or anything like that. Which is really hard, right? Instagram for Kids scares the bejesus out of me.

I think all of these things, any social network that targets kids specifically has a giant uphill battle, but it's work worth doing. And my argument was that platforms like Grindr should be doing it. That's it. So you weren't advocating older people to be dating underage? No. I mean, my husband's 10 years older than me, but like, no, I'm not like making a recommendation that platforms like Grindr or anywhere else have any tolerance for pedophilia. Of course not. So what happened? So after tweeting publicly that I'm a person of high integrity, after telling people that he has complete confidence in me, you know, the last time I sat down for an interview with you,

the retaliation was all of this. So I'm curious to see what will happen after we talk today. But back then, Elon Musk turned to some random person on Twitter who was tweeting at him with an extract from my dissertation and said, well, that explains a lot. And what he was suggesting was that the presence of child sexual abuse on Twitter wasn't just a tragedy. It wasn't just a failure of content moderation. It was my responsibility and my fault, and that I had actually made an intentional decision to allow the proliferation of child sexual abuse on Twitter. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it was a smear tactic. It's one that's

deployed commonly against LGBTQ folks, and it worked. So tell me how you lived for the past year. In transit, I guess would be the polite way to put it. Shortly after this happened, I had to sell my house. I had to move. I bounced between a couple of different places for a few months with my husband and my dog and all my crap. And then lived in a temporary apartment for a while while I tried to figure out where to land next. And you got death threats? Absolutely. Many of them on Twitter. And I would note, you know, if I imagine one of the things that you will hear a little bit later on is about all of the work that's been done to make Twitter safer. I would encourage Twitter to take a look at the death threats targeting me,

the death threats that were inspired by the company's leader. They're all still there. Twitter didn't take them down. Thousands of them. They're still on the platform today. Are you still, I just recently interviewed Adam Kinzinger, same thing. He had death threats. He had all kinds of things. And because of what he did around January 6th in opposing Trump, it has a lot of echoes of the same kind of behavior. Did you contact Elon at all?

Tell him to lay off? Or why are you calling me essentially a pedophile? You know, I thought about it. Or implying, I guess. I thought about it, but no, I didn't. It didn't. It was so divorced from reality that I was kind of like, do you bring facts to a defamation fight? Like it didn't make sense in reality. The conversation didn't seem like it was based on anything I said or anything I did. And so I didn't believe that anything I said or did would actually change what was playing out. And this is really the thesis of the piece that I

wrote in the New York Times last week. I don't think that this is just personal invective. I don't think this is just targeting me because I'm a bad person. Or you left. I think it's a strategy. It's a strategy to get people to shut up. It's a strategy to scare every other ex-Twitter employee into never speaking their mind again, because look what happens. Look how easy it is to blow up the life of this schmuck. It happened with one tweet. Let me ask you, what was the worst threat that happened to you? I don't want to dwell there, but what, were you scared? You know, I've been getting death threats online for years.

Yes, Kellyanne Conway was your first. Was the first person who really put me out there in public. That was an interesting one. But, you know, I don't believe I've had it the worst of anybody who has been harassed online, far from it. But at a certain point, you start to lose perspective on what's realistic and what isn't. When day in and day out, you're getting emails and text messages and DMs and tweets saying that you should be thrown into a wood chipper for what you have done to sexualize children or to undermine democracy. At certain point you have to ask yourself like is this real or is this not is somebody going to pull up a wood chipper in front of my house like you have to every time you read one of these things go through this mental anguish of figuring out is it real is it not so yeah whether you're under threat no it's terrible i i actually talked

to paul pelosi about, which was another tweet. You know, the people who try to defend this as a matter of free speech say, thin-skinned, like, why would you take it seriously? This is just people saying things on the internet. That's not the experience that anybody who has been abused online will attest to having one of the things i always said is one of the reasons the internet is is more unsafe than it should be is because the people who made it never felt unsafe a day in their lives and that's always been my thesis a general thesis not all of them but a lot of them let's talk about the use of lawsuits elon uses them a lot of people are using them now and threats against those he and other people oppose it's not just elon it's a lot of people it's a strategy as you you wrote, private individuals from academic researchers to employees in tech companies are increasingly the target of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and vicious online

attacks. These efforts, largely staged by the right, are having their desired effect. We've stopped having a conversation about the facts. We've stopped having a debate about which ideas are good, which ideas are bad, good research, bad research. We've just tried, we've sort of entered this phase where silencing people has become the de facto way to advance your interests. And this is playing out really, really clearly in the academic domain. University researchers, people who are not usually in the limelight, they're writing some papers, they have some graduate students. University researchers, people who are not usually in the limelight, they're writing some papers, they have some graduate students. University researchers are now getting sued and are subject to discovery in these lawsuits and have to turn over thousands of emails between them

and their students and about research projects for ultimately frivolous and vexatious lawsuits about, I don't know, censorship or something. These are, to be clear, not people who could ever censor anybody on any social media platform, but they're now being sued. They have to do it. All the people I cover who used to talk to me regularly will not talk to me on the record. None of them. It's really, they're terrified. Now, let me be very, the critique is that the left does this too in the cancel culture, academics. The corollary next sentence being universities are weeding out professors for having dissenting opinions.

Social media companies are booting or disclaiming those that disagree. I agree with you, but it's not the same thing. But give us a nuanced argument a 1,200-word piece can't have. What's that defense? Because there's censoriousness most certainly on the left. Yeah. Look, I think the refutation here is, I think the phrase is, you're decorum pilled. It's this idea that if people aren't behaving with perfect decorum, then you can silence them by attacking the manner of their expression rather than the content of their ideas.

by attacking the manner of their expression rather than the content of their ideas. And I'm actually pretty sympathetic to that. I haven't read the Musk biography yet. I know we're going to talk about that. But my husband flipped through it. I did that for everybody so you didn't have to. Excellent. My husband flipped through it and he gave me his review. And he said, you use a lot of profanity. And for anybody who knows me, that's broadly accurate. I'm actually very surprised I haven't yet cursed on stage. But the question is, like, is that legitimate? Is that a question of decorum? And are my ideas delegitimized by the fact that I use profanity? I think having those kinds of arguments gets silly. You should be talking to

people about what they're trying to argue, what their points are, and what their evidence are. And we end up in these slightly silly conversations about who's using the right word for what and are you saying it in the right ways. I think all of that undermines the quality of the discussion. I want us to have a conversation about evidence. When we talk about how much hate speech there is on Twitter I want us to have a conversation about evidence. When we talk about how much hate speech there is on Twitter, I want to have a conversation about the methods behind

the study. Is the data real? Is it three one thousandths of a percent or not? And we've moved so far away from that. Right. And that's the way they do it. Let's talk about the effective tools to fight back narrative tours like your op-eds or this discussion, lawsuits like ex-employees are pursuing, in the case of Twitter at least, regulation government inquiries like the FTC consent degree. Can any or all of them work when it comes to arguing with the person who's the richest person on earth? And then you call for regulation and pulling out of tricky countries in your op-ed, which seems unrealistic. Yeah. Look, I think the regulatory time moves a lot slower than internet time. And so I think we're going to see lagging effects here. But it

is inevitable. I think if the European Union has proven anything, it's that they are willing and able to regulate large companies and push them to abide by the laws of the European Union. And so if I had to make a prediction, it would be that it won't be right now, might not even be a year from now, but there will be consequences. The question is how much damage happens between now and then to individual people who work at companies like me, to the quality of the conversation on Twitter, to the platform itself. I think there's a lot that can be done before regulation catches up with reality. And that's what really worries me. Okay. So, and yet you're still, it's not just these ridiculous tweets from Elon. It's Jim Jordan, his goose chase of you, and I'm going to call it a goose chase,

whatever he does. And Chris Krebs, who worked for Trump and was fired because he told the truth about the election denialism. What is the status of that and the impact? I saw his badly written letter to you. Where is that right now? They're investigating you for being the great censor of, you don't particularly strike me as the most powerful person on earth, but please disabuse me if that's the case. I don't believe so. But no, I'm one of hundreds of academics who have received letters from Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee saying that they would like to interview us. And these interviews are not public. The transcripts of these interviews are not public. But you are

asked questions for hours. And to be clear, I already testified about everything that I know in front of the House Judiciary Committee for five hours in February. Like that already happened. But there's more questions, I guess. I haven't had the interview yet, but there have been many others who have. And what happens is a strategy. There's an interview. The transcript of the interview isn't public. Excerpts of it are then taken out of context and make their way into things like an amicus brief in a lawsuit, or then become a quote that's used in a report attacking the Department of Homeland Security. None of it is fact-based. All of it is about insinuation and innuendo,

and that's the outcome. And what really worries me is not sitting down on the record for another interview with Jim Jordan or his staffers, bring it on. What I worry about is that the results of that, the transcript of it, the things that I'm saying won't actually be made public. I don't believe I have anything to hide. The Twitter files are the contents of my corporate email account for eight years. It's all out there. I'm an open book, but I want it to actually be open. And that's not what we're getting as a product of these investigations. Yeah, that investigation at the Twitter open book. But I want it to actually be open. And that's not what we're getting as a product of these investigations. Yeah, that investigation at the Twitter files seemed a little light. I, yeah. Yeah. You know, there's, I think by the time I left my corporate Gmail account was like

150 gigabytes of stuff. And there's a lot there. There's a lot there that I think would be important for understanding the future of social media. Yeah, there's something about us coordinating our outfits and everything like that. Yeah, it's true. It's true. But like, that's not what we got, right? We didn't get meaningful transparency into the coercive influences on Twitter's decisions. I think that's a real problem, right? I think if the government is pressuring tech platforms to censor, like we should all be terrified about that. I wrote a piece for the Knight First Amendment Institute that says, yeah, jawboning is an issue, but we need to have a fact-based conversation. And I'll get to that case, because it was interesting. At one point, you were all,

you and Vijay Gade and a bunch of you were dealing with an issue. And the person, that particular person, I don't remember which one of them was, was saying, can you believe they all got together and discussed this? And I was like, they're the managers of the whole company. Yes, I do believe it. I believe we were doing our job. That's what I said. You may or may not have made good decisions. That's very different. But there are also critical court cases of the government talking to social media you're calling it jaw-bowing that are winning

they're they're winning and these things that the government now is is completely everyone in government is not talking to social media companies as we're going into election what do you if you were still running trust and safety what do you do then you're not hearing from the government critical things whether it's sisa or whoever this scares the crap out of me. Like when I think about the biggest risks that we are facing in 2024, it's actually not even if these court cases succeed. This is the interesting bit. A lot of elements, nine parts out of 10 of the Fifth Circuit's ruling in Missouri v. Biden were actually overturned. The decision was most of the Fifth Circuit's ruling in Missouri v. Biden were actually overturned. The decision was, most of the communication between governments and platforms can happen. But after that happened,

did you see governments start talking to platforms again? No. The meetings are still canceled. Nobody's talking. The strategy works even when it loses in court. And that's really what worries me. It's a chilling effect. You don't actually need to prohibit government from talking to platforms. You just need to scare them into not doing it. It's what they're doing to academics. It's what they're doing to folks working in government. And it's what they're doing to the platforms themselves. And the result of it is that- Because they don't know what's going to happen. So they'd rather be judicious, correct? Because the alternative is getting roped into a lawsuit, getting hauled in front of the

Judiciary Committee, having a public hearing where Marjorie Taylor Greene calls you a pedophile. Like, those are the consequences. Did she do that? To me, yeah. Okay. Not fun. But if you look at it and you're like, well, I could talk to platforms and deal with all of that, or I could just not do that.

The decision is obvious. You don't do it. Engaging on these issues is an act of courage, and the incentives for that courage no longer exist in Silicon Valley. Right, to do anything about it. So let's get into the real implications of the upcoming election. Who is doing it well? There's Facebook, Instagram slash threads. There's Blue Sky Master on slash post, Snapchat. Who is doing, who can do it well? Or are they all just like, yeah, we don't have to do it anymore. All right, I'm gonna say something really controversial. Okay.

I think TikTok are doing it well. Oh, wow. Okay. So let me caveat this by saying, I don't use TikTok. I don't allow it on my phone and I don't allow my husband to have it on his phone on our home Wi-Fi.

I've also written previously about why I worry from a national security standpoint about TikTok. But of all of the big platforms, of all of the VLOPs, the very large online platforms, as they're called in Europe, only one of them hasn't laid off their trust and safety staff this year. It's TikTok. And they continue to invest heavily in addressing misinformation. They continue to invest heavily in identifying inauthentic behavior. Bracket, would they find it if it was coming from China? I don't know.

But I continue to see them actually invest in these areas because they're worried about getting banned, but they're worried about getting banned, but they're still doing it. So I think TikTok are doing a good job here. And nope, everybody else is pulling back. Other than the new platforms, right? Like, let me, I'm seeing that we're about out of time, so I'll end on perhaps not a totally... No, it's okay. It's okay. No, I've got a couple more. I get to stay here as long as I want. I made this conference.

The perks of being Kara Swisher. made this conference. The perks of being Kara Swisher. So on an optimistic note, we're in probably the most exciting moment in the last 15 years of social media because finally, there's an incredible amount of investment in building new stuff. We are seeing a lot of new entrants. You named a lot of them. My personal favorite is Blue Sky at the moment, but it's anybody's game. And that's really cool. Because from a consumer standpoint, for the first time in 15 years, it's not something that's taken for granted that your network is on Twitter or on Instagram. It's wherever. Or you have many. Or you have many. Yes. I'm using threads a lot, which is interesting, which apparently caused Mark Zuckerberg said, she must really like me more.

And someone's like, no, she likes Elon less. I don't like either of them. So, I mean, whatever. I don't care. I don't honestly care. I have a life and a family. Anyway, on true social, I have a couple more questions. I do want to get through them. Trump is kind of losing his mind. It's a short and a family. Anyway, on true social, I have a couple more questions. I do want to get through them.

Trump is kind of losing his mind. It's a short trip, obviously. He's called for the execution of the U.S. as a top general. People are shrugging. Oh, well, he did that today. You know, every day it's a different, like, new fresh hell and everyone doesn't care. Give me the argument for just letting this go or the argument for doing more vigilant kind of stuff. They just sort of let him like he's the crazy uncle on the corner screaming at people. Yeah, we can't let that happen, right? Like the shifting

Overton window of what is acceptable and what isn't even on something as simple as violence is terrifying to me. Like when you sort of ease up on questioning whether it's ever acceptable for somebody to call for the death of another person, I feel like there's a profound loss there for humanity. And I worry that we can't walk back from that. So what do you do? Well, I'm not using Truth Social. Okay, good. All right, check. What are the breaks in the system you're seeing,

or where is the company better off where you left it? What's going to happen from having been there so long? Now, you're not on the inside. You don't know. There might be Keebler elves in there making it all right. It could happen. I'm not optimistic. I mean, just today, the last remaining staffers at Twitter who have expertise in election security were all summarily fired. So when I went into this year and people started asking me, what do you predict about 2024? I was like, look, there's one person still left at Twitter in Dublin who has single-handedly kept global elections from going off the rails. I hired him myself. He's brilliant. For as long as he can stick it out, there's a hope.

Summarily fired. So I'm not super optimistic about that. Linda Iaccarino will be up here shortly. I know Linda really well. Terrific advertising executive. I have had great experiences with her over the years. I'm surprised by some of the stuff at Twitter, but she'll answer her questions from Julia Borsten. I think the big question is here whether she's got the power to affect change or recruit advertisers,

something she's, again, fantastic at, giving Elon's incessant and sometimes problematic meddling. And that's a nice version of it. Do you think she has the power to lead Twitter slash X? And will advertisers come back? Advertisers aren't stupid. If there's a change that I saw in my time at the company, it was that the advertising industry and the marketing industry collectively

stopped buying bullshit from platforms. They demand data. They demand data. They demand evidence. And it can't just be cherry-picked evidence that the platform hands out in an unaccountable way. They want proof. And I think having a reasonable, tenured, well-respected executive at the helm is a good thing. I don't know her personally, but I hear a lot of the same things that you just said. I think that's great. But for advertisers to come back to Twitter, and to be clear, that's where the money comes from, I think they're going to need evidence of progress on safety that Twitter can't provide.

And they can't provide it because Twitter is less safe now than it used to be. And what is the impact then of Elon? If he's the, if he is, is he the singular leader from your perspective? And can you have an effective content moderation organization where this is how over here, he's talking with the, I haven't brought up the ADL at all yet,

but that was just, again, the latest fresh hell. Yeah. I, if Elon is calling the shots, then that is a version of content moderation. But is it what Twitter's users are looking for? And is it what Twitter's advertisers are looking for? And I think the evidence suggests that it isn't. Twitter's own data about the number of tweets on the platform suggests that there's been a 75% drop in the amount of content on the service.

that there's been a 75% drop in the amount of content on the service. Three quarters of the content on Twitter went away from its peak. That's their numbers. That should be really scary. That should be setting off alarm bells for Linda and for the rest of the executive team at Twitter. How do you turn that around? How do you make people start tweeting again? I'll give you a hint. Make it safe. They're not doing that. I don't think it works. Okay, so I have two more quick interviews. Interesting in this interview that Mark Zuckerberg did with Alex Heath, saying he was a change agent, and I believe that too. I do think he's been pretty polarizing. This is Mark saying, it's so typical.

Pretty polarizing. Really, Mark? You're kidding. Oh, Mark Zuckerberg, he's funny. The chance that X reaches a full potential on the trajectory it's on, I think it's less than the chance that it was before. So do you agree with Mark Zuckerberg on that? That X is not on the most positive trajectory? Yeah, that seems like a safe statement. Okay. And you said to me at the end of our interview a year ago, smell this question, when I asked you for any advice for Elon, before he attacked you, by the way, and you were very kind, I thought, much kinder than you needed to be. And you said, humility would go a long way. And I said, no. I was dubious. And I was right, but that's not the point of that. What advice would you now give to Elon and what advice would you give to Linda? I'll start with Linda. I read the profile of her

in the Financial Times by Hannah Murphy, and I was really struck by her talking about the challenges that she experiences with abuse and harassment targeting her. And I truly feel for her. I genuinely, genuinely do. Nobody should have to experience that. Not a CEO, not a journalist, not me, not anybody. Look at what your boss did to me. It happened to me.

It happened after he sang my praises publicly. It happened after I didn't attack him. I didn't attack the company. You quietly left. You wouldn't talk to me. I know that. And then he did that to me. If not for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for those that you love, be worried. You should be worried. I wish I had been more worried. And so I hope she is thinking about what those risks are and what she might face. And to Elon? I believe there are still people within Twitter who care about the platform, who care about making thoughtful, principled, evidence-backed decisions, and who advocate for Twitter's users. Listen to them. Give them space. Don't overrule them. And that's very hard

to do. I think I wouldn't bet that it's likely to happen. But building a social network is really complicated. It's really hard, and it requires a lot of difficult decisions. You can't do it by instinct. You've got to do it by data. And I worry that that's not the decision-making style at Twitter anymore. I'll close with what I told Elon when I quit. I told him, I'm rooting for you, and I'm rooting for Twitter. This was before he called me a pedophile. So I will say like my opinion of Elon has shifted somewhat, but I'm rooting for the people who use Twitter to affect change in the world. I'm rooting for the platform and I'm

rooting for its role in the world. And if Linda as a leader can make that platform a success, that will be a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I'm rooting for her too. On that, fantastic. Thank you. All right. That was the Yoel Roth interview. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with Julia Boorstin in conversation

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Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. Constantcontact.ca. You've just heard Kara's code interview with Yoel Roth, and less than an hour later, Julia Borsten welcomed ex-CEO Linda Iaccarino to the stage. Here's that interview. Please welcome Linda Iaccarino. Linda, thank you for being here. Before we dive in, I have so much to cover,

I probably have hours worth of questions. But I want to make sure to give you an opportunity to respond to Yoel Roth and his comments about an hour ago. Chuckles. Chuckling. Just for full context, you joined Twitter in June, and Yoel did leave long before you got there, so you did not overlap. But he's describing terrible things that happened to him and also his experience at a company that months later you have come to run. I want to give you an opportunity to respond to him. I'd be happy to respond.

I think I've been given about 45 minutes. Yes, and also full disclosure, as many of you saw, he was a very late addition to the schedule. A surprise both to me and Linda that he was added here. So not something that either of us were fully prepared for. I think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage. But here we are. So thank you for asking the question. And Julia's right. We have known each other for a very long time and have had a very long deep strong relationship so when situations like this happen unexpectedly maybe they were unexpected we stay strong together so we're going to move on.

But I do want to address Yoel and I don't know each other. He doesn't know me. I don't know him. I work at X. He worked at Twitter. X, he worked at Twitter. X is a new company building a foundation based on free expression and freedom of speech. Twitter, at the time, was operating on different sets of rules,

as said by himself, different philosophies and ideologies that were creeping down the road of censorship. It's a new day at X, and I'll leave it at that. When asked what his advice to you was, Kara asked him what his advice to you was, and he made a comment about the death threats or the threats to his physical self that both you and he have experienced and him wanting to make sure that you are taking any protections or precautions on the platform seriously. The team at Twitter is fantastic. If you're talking about my own personal well-being and safety, I feel great.

I'm well protected. He made a comment about the FT interview, I guess, as he was preparing to come on the stage, that the public scrutiny weighs heavy on me, my kids, my family, my parents. I think that's just a human emotion when you get thrust into such a public spotlight in conjunction with the nature of the platform itself, when you're automatically a recognizable public feature, public person, 24 seven globally, and and with the ability for or the inability for anyone to control other humans, actions, comments, recognizable, and I'm an identical twin think how she feels i actually made the security team a dollar bet because i only ever bet a dollar by the way because the reason i only bet a dollar ever is because it's really only about winning right so i i told them i had a security concern and i bet that they had never been confronted with it

and they're like there's no way we've seen it all. I said, what are you going to do for my identical twin? So I won the dollar. But to get back to the serious situation, I appreciate Yoel's comments. And I, you know, again, we don't know each other. I assume they were authentic. But that is something that all public people and a lot of times CEOs have to confront because of the public nature of their position, compromise, insecurity. So again, some people, some other people, CEO friends of mine, peers, have reached out to me. I said, reach out to me if there's anything I could do to help you on the platform. But according to Yoel's words himself, they were platform-wide. He wasn't specifically saying it was just coming from X.

So I want to be clear about that. We did Google and did see that there were threats to him that were still up there. That was really the one surprising thing to me. And it does seem like that is in violation of the policies of X Twitter. If he'd reach out to me directly, I'd be happy to. If in fact those comments are true, I'd be happy to help them out as I would be happy to help anyone in this room or anyone who's listening. But I also want to take a moment. And again, I hope we can get to pivot and to talk about all the momentum

that's going on at X. But I want to, it's very hard for me to refute or sift through the combination of opinions of Yoel's experience and the positioned as fact that were presented. One of the things he talked about, which was so surprising, is that 75% decline in content posted to X that in fact is not true and is inaccurate. And there are many days, weeks, months where there's actually more content posted to X. And that is in spite of our aggressive efforts to fight spam and bots. So think about that. Net of our aggressive efforts that uniquely started happening at X that other platforms have followed suit, content posting up. So that's one thing. But Linda, because I want to shift gears from Yoel's interview to a conversation about the business.

Yoel had 25 minutes to talk about it. You have a lot longer if you want. You have all the time that you have for us. I want to talk to you about the business and the issues of engagement because I see a lot of data as a reporter at CNBC and Apptopia, which tracks app usage, says the actual time spent on Twitter

did get a post-Elon bump after the acquisition, but has tracked down all year since then. A new report out from Apptopia just this month says app downloads have sunk to new lows. It's in 96th place. And when it comes to usage, X is now 25th in active users behind Telegram and even Samsung Clock. So how can we reconcile what Musk has said about engagement, the numbers you just cited, with all of these different data points here? engagement, the numbers you just cited with all of these different data points here?

Well, you know, with over 540 million global users, I'd love to sift through, you know, the data points that you picked out. And they're really just tracks of app downloads and engagement. Yeah. But when you look at the length of time spent, the engagement on X right now, the key metrics are trending very, very positively. So if we want to talk about all the initiatives that have been put in place, like was covered in the previous interview about all the brand safety and content moderation tools that exist now within my first hundred days at the company that didn't exist for the eight years prior, formerly known as Twitter, I think those are the type of things we should be focusing on in terms of progress that has been made. Because in a just short

hundred days-ish that I've been at the company, what had to happen was for me to kind of get in, look under the hood. And when I realized and I looked at, because it's still a lot of learning, I mean, come on, it's a hundred days. There's a lot of learning that's still a lot of learning. I mean, come on, it's 100 days. There's a lot of learning that's still going to go on. But the velocity of change, the scope of the ambition at X really does not exist anywhere else. Forget the other platforms, at any other company likely on earth. There is no analog for the book that is being written right now. So if you look at infrastructure changes, over 100 products shipped since acquisition, brand safety and content moderation tools that didn't exist, advertiser products that did not exist that are now wrapped up in brand safety,

third-party verification partners that did not exist. The company that was described about an hour ago no longer exists. And I would argue pretty aggressively, exists, and I would argue pretty aggressively, no matter if you want to, I don't know the stat, did you say telegram? Does anyone say telegram? No, you're behind telegram. No, no, I know. I have to scrub your numbers. But that being said, that when you put in context what has happened in the last 10 months and specifically the last 12 weeks of listening to our employees, listening to our customers, those advertising customers that you reference, that I was given such great advice that I could prove from a data-driven standpoint, and they'll come back. The great news is another fact that was inaccurate. In June, actually, I did an interview with one of your colleagues at CNBC, Sarah Eisen. I think in August. Was that August? It was 100 days.

Oh, yeah. I started in June. It's all a blur. Because again, the pace of innovation is unlike anything you could ever imagine. Think about it. It's exhilarating to the point of intoxicating. That's why when you get inspired and pushed by Elon Musk to do the things that you would never normally think were possible, you land on a day like today. You show up, you tell them the mountain high of accomplishments that were made in just 12 weeks. And you don't look back and compare yourself to a legacy company that doesn't exist anymore. But so Linda, I want to get some of these stats. So you mentioned your interview. company that doesn't exist anymore. So Linda, I want to get some of these stats. So you mentioned your interview. It's been a day, so I brought my card. You're welcome to. I have my cards. I was supposed to put an X on it, but I was watching the interview and I didn't have time. Okay. So

one question I have is what are the daily active users that you have? Because that is the metric that Twitter was using before Elon Musk came over. And you mentioned the Sarah Eisen interview. What are your daily active users? And then also you told Sarah you were nearing profitability. How close are you? Yeah, well, that's so exciting. I'll get back to your first question. But what's so exciting is that

from an operating cashflow perspective, we're just about breakeven. So the kind of other emotion that was painted in the previous talk, we feel pretty good about where we are. And when I did the other talk that you said was in August, it was too soon. I think it was about five or six weeks in. I couldn't have eyes on even the rest of third quarter, let alone fourth quarter. So now that I have immersed myself in the business, and we have a good set of eyes on what is predictable and what's coming, is that it looks like in early 24, we'll be turning a profit. So that's exciting. I want to get back to another stat about 75% or I think he said 60% of advertisers had left the platform or something. Well, that's what Elon Musk said.

No, he said 60% of advertising revenue. He didn't say advertisers. But again, another point of distinction when you're talking about months and months old information. So 90% of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform. In the last 12 weeks alone, about 1,500 have returned. So whether it is a small business or big brands, right? Like AT&T, Visa, Nissan, all returning. Why are they returning? They are returning because of the power and significance of the platform. The place that X has in this world.

So do you have a stat on daily active users? Yeah, I'm going to. Okay. Probably 200, 250, something like that. Okay, well, so the stat when Musk took over. Did Yoel leave his facts? No, this was, when Musk took over, there were 237 million monetizable daily active users. Yeah, so listen to this.

Listen to this. One of the reasons that I'm in the chair I'm in today, and in the chair I am at X leading the company, is because I knew for the last decade, and you knew this, part of my old remit was to oversee not only the advertising revenue for the company, but to look after all of our enterprise relationships, our, I still say our, all of the NBCU enterprise relationships, and Twitter was one of them. I specifically used the name Twitter, by the way, purposefully. And that's when for 10 years, and how I fell in love with the platform. Because I knew, first of all, we all knew the trajectory of where broadcast cable, television and usage and consumption was growing, going. But this powered by now X was the only mechanism that could take the premium content business, live global events, news, when I used to sit in my office and watch you on television, it was the only thing that could put you live, in culture, where it happens, in the moment.

in the moment. So the users of X, our community of ferociously loyal user base shows up. Everyone who's in marketing in this room, what you want to get to is that you're a habit. It's habitual that you're checking this FOMO morning, noon, and night. And do you have any new engagement numbers you could share with us? Because those stats from Aptopia and others, other sources show a decline. What sources were they? It was Aptopia. And I have the whole, the list here. Some of the, whatever sources I just cited.

But I'd love to, I'll give you, I'll give you almost like a more personal, specific number, which demonstrates part of the growth at X. If you take our communities, 50,000 curated environments and conversations of communities on X, okay? communities on X. Okay. The engagement numbers and time spent is up dramatically just since June. Okay. Right. So, so hold on. I want to, but we're running, we're running short on time. So I got to get, we have so much to cover here. So, okay. Where do you, where do you want to go? Okay, I want to talk about your role running the company. Okay, thank you. Elon Musk just announced a new monthly fee for users. Yep. And my question for you is,

do you want to start charging all users of X, as he said, and how many users do you think you will lose as a result? Can you repeat? Elon Musk announced you're moving to an entirely subscription-based service. Nothing free about using X. Did he say we were moving to it specifically or is thinking about it? He said that's the plan. Yeah.

So did he consult you before he announced that? We talk about everything. Did you, your background is in advertising. I would be surprised if you want to get rid of a free version. Why wouldn't we? To have no free version of X? Okay. So, so do you think Elon brought me to the company to be the head of advertising, which I appreciate Kara's comments that said, I'm such a fantastic advertising executive? Or do you think he brought

me to run the company and to deliver to our users the best possible experience? And one of the biggest struggles I had in my previous career at the other companies I worked for was I was known as a provocateur. I was called a heretic a couple of times because I constantly tried to push legacy media companies to change, to iterate, to innovate. Why did I do that? I did that to keep up with consumer behavior. And X will become the best, most useful platform to what the consumers want. You got to admit, it's not boring. It's one of the funniest places on earth.

And when you think about how users are able to communicate, to now watch video, soon to be able to transact that is a whole experience where there is no surrogate today there is no surrogate for x so hang on so hang on so i it's continually you know i could sit here and and use the um answer your questions about 540 monthly active users, 225 daily active users, but I'm not sure you're even asking me the right questions. Because we're so caught up constantly in the noise or the post of the moment. And what's going on under our nose is a platform in transformation where there is no surrogate. But so then talk to me about this comment that Elon Musk made just a week ago saying he wanted to make it all subscription to fight the army of

bots. And when I heard that news, I thought two things. Number one, I would be surprised if you, whose background is in free ad-supported content on all the broadcast networks. I think my background is being a very senior executive. Senior executive, but I would be surprised if you didn't want to have some free version of X. And I'm curious if you agree or if you think it all should be subscription-based. And my question for you was, the two things I thought was, I would be curious to know if you thought that was a good plan. And second, how much he consulted you. Because, yes, you were brought in as CEO.

That is your title. But you don't cover product. All of the product teams report to Elon Musk. And as a result of that, there's been a lot of... Does anyone in this room think there would be a... Can I finish? Please, Linda. Let me finish. Sure, sure, sure. As a result of the fact that the product team does not report to you, the product team at Meta reports to Mark Zuckerberg,

because the product team does not report to you, there has been speculation that you are in more of a COO role or a CBO role, a CEO in name only role? You know, what's funny is that we talk about that a lot at X. As you know, it's a very flat organization and the teams are very empowered to perform at their highest levels. So I'm not sure what your definition of, or how you want to kind of wiggle me into an answer of, are you really just a COO or a, I don't know. CEO, CEO and name only. Oh, CEO. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Not nice. But that being said, that being said, I think what Elon and I talk about a lot, number one, always starts with the user experience. And that has to be primary but i want to go back to your uh he runs product uh he runs technology he leads a team of exceptionally talented engineers and who's kidding who i don't care what the structure is at Meta, but who wouldn't want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?

I see a show of hands. There may be a few show of hands to get the cute chuckles you're getting, but I would say the percentages in this room are about 99% who would say no to that and 1% of maybe personal opinion or feelings. Notably, last week, Walter Isaacson came out with a book. Did you read it? I have not read it.

It's very long. I've not read all of it. So no, no, I've not read it. I've read many excerpts. On C-SPAN, sorry for the competitive network, but his interview, he was interviewed on C-SPAN. I thought it was excellent. I have read many excerpts.

I mean, it's a very long book for those of you who have read it. In this book, in interviews that Musk has done, in his tweets, Musk comes off as, I will say, mercurial. I think that is a fair description of him. And Walter Isaacson describes him as having a, quote, demon mode. When was the last time you saw the demon mode? And how's it like to work with someone who has that? I've been there 12 weeks.

I am still somewhat in awe of his availability to me. So the moments where you think we don't talk, we talk. His unbelievable availability, it's stunning. I've never experienced any of that. He's been consistently and completely supportive of me. Now, this also is not my first rodeo. I've reported to a lot of CEOs, you go through highs and lows because you have differences of opinions and you have a different scope of experiences. But one thing Elon always talks

about, or actually the whole team's talk about, is the feedback loop that exists. Just think about the nature of the platform. I mean, the feedback loop is incredible. And also, we always talk about the value of that negative feedback loop. So the opportunity to state an opinion based on your scope of experiences and point of view is always encouraged. If you don't have that push and pull, when does the innovation happen? When you question what used to exist or you question the challenge that lies ahead, if you don't debate and there's not a friction there, how does the next happen? I mean, if the car industry wasn't questioned,

would we have the electronic car industry? I mean, I could go on and on about the list of accomplishments and I'm not here to go down that road or to represent that. All I'm saying is that the idea of the inability to have a debate or feedback I haven't experienced, or I'll say I haven't experienced it yet, because you all go through different turns in your relationship. turns in your relationship. And, you know, all good 12 weeks in. I wish that we could have spent more time talking about the scope of accomplishments. Can we talk more? I'd love to talk to you about the media business that you're building. I know that it says we're out of time, but if you're okay to keep going, I would like to keep going. I'll wait till they come give me the hook. Well, they're not going to give you the hook, Linda. I have hours more of questions here.

I know you have places to be. But I would like to keep going. And I think specifically when it comes to why you are at X, I know it is to rebuild the relationship with advertisers. And I know I'd be remiss not to ask about the ADL. And we've had the head of the ADL on CNBC multiple times. He reported, first he talked about how much he respected Elon Musk once Elon took over Twitter.

And more recently, he talked about how he had a great productive meeting with you. We did. That is in fact true. Which was followed by Elon Musk saying he was threatening to sue the ADL. I wish that would be different. We're looking into that. So do you... I want to be clear about the situation. Okay.

So shortly after, maybe a day after the transaction and acquisition of the company, the ADL under Jonathan's leadership came out with a letter ecosystem-wide suggesting that advertisers pause on the platform. Well, was this the coalition of 60 civil rights groups? Because there was, what I remember covering in November 2022, was 60 civil rights groups, including Color of Change, Media Matters, Free Press, and yes, the EDL. They did launch a campaign called Stop Toxic Twitter, but they were releasing data. You asked me specifically about the ADL. So the ADL has been very consistent about suggested pausing of advertisers on then Twitter continues into X. Those were related to Elon's comments about advertisers being down so significantly. about advertisers being down so significantly. The productive conversation I had with Jonathan, and I would hope that there will be productive conversations in the future, was about the need for the ADL to acknowledge all the progress that has been made now at X.

And therein lies the moment that we're living in today. And when Jonathan continues to question the progress as it relates to anti-Semitism, it is disappointing that there is not equal time given to all the progress. As a matter of fact, did you get an alert on your phone about the spaces that Ilan is doing tomorrow night? I did not, but admittedly have not been on my phone today.

Okay. Well, Ilan is co-hosting and participating in a spaces tomorrow night with, I believe it's nine. It could have grown more. Very influential Jewish leaders in the world to discuss anti-Semitism, the current state of the impact on culture, and how X can help.

So I will leave you with that. But Linda, is this in response to the 100 Jewish leaders, including prominent rabbis and academics, releasing this public letter? I don't believe so. I don't believe so. And again, what you're referencing, I was just made aware of it today. I think it came out yesterday. This, I don't believe so. As you know, last week, Ilan also met with Prime Minister Netanyahu. So that in conjunction with open conversations that we have with a lot of these groups, right? So whether it's the AJC

or the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, we have an open, honest partnership relationship. And if there's something that comes up that we were not perfect and we didn't catch, they DM me directly. They contact me so I could alert the trust and safety team. And we invite all of our partners to participate for the solution, to create a solution to benefit the people who are being harmed when things are negotiated in the press for headlines. So imagine if we were able to take the conversation from a proactive, from a reactive one, when some of the damage has already been done and enable us to be proactive as partners to focus on the real solution. And I wish everybody would have that as their priority

focus because some of these groups have moved beyond the scope of their original mandate into activist organizations. But Linda, to me, the way I saw you at NBC Universal is very conciliatory. That was part of your job. And the way I saw you meeting with Jonathan Greenblatt and having these meetings, very conciliatory. That is your reputation. It is how I've known you. I'm a nurturer and a solution provider. So let me finish the question. The fact that days after that meeting with Jonathan Greenblatt, Elon Musk threatens to sue the ADL makes me wonder if he's working in opposition to what you're doing. And it makes me wonder if you think at the ADL, which is the continuation of focusing on an advertiser ecosystem to pause at X without acknowledging progress

is the situation. When you reference my style of being very partnership-oriented or use your word conciliatory is because I built a career on partnerships, knowledge, and hard work, right? That continues at X, okay? And I've also spent my entire career being candid and completely transparent. Ask anyone who's ever done business with me. And sometimes that creates tough, candid conversations. But I'm always going to stand up for the truth. And that's what you're hearing from me today. Is that this is about the truth. And that's what you're hearing from me today,

is that this is about the truth. But do you think that it is better to have these conversations and these meetings, as you're describing, or to threaten a lawsuit? Are there times when you wish that Elon Musk would not tweet and would instead let you do your job? and you wish that Elon Musk would not tweet and would instead let you do your job? The foundation of X is based on free expression

and freedom of speech. Everyone deserves to have that opportunity to speak their opinion, no matter who they are, including Elon, including you, Julia. We can't just decide who doesn't get to post or have their opinion because we don't like it. It's actually what we talk a lot about. Free expression is only successful. Freedom of speech, only successful. If someone you disagree with says something you disagree with. And on that note, I have got to run.

Can I get two more minutes with you on your trust and safety work that you've been doing? Because this is something that you all referenced. I'd like you to get a chance to respond to him. Oh, yeah, I do. I'm kind of glad you brought that up because he said there was one person on the election integrity team. Well, today there was an article out in the information that reported that all these people had been fired. I think they referenced three, and that isn't entirely accurate.

But he also said there was only one person at the company. So just to reference what Elon Musk tweeted in response to the information article. He said that, yes, the team that was the global election integrity team, the disinformation election fraud, this was the team focused on that, must confirm that they had been fired. And he said that this team had previously undermined election integrity. Over a billion people are going to vote in 2024. It's not just in the U.S. Election integrity is an issue all around the world. And it's an issue we take very seriously.

And contrary to the comments that were made, there is a robust and growing team at X that is wrapping their arms around election integrity. And it is a spectrum of skill set and discipline from operations to brand safety. And it fights platform manipulation, disinformation, right? It captures everything that we need to protect on our platform. It's not only one person that was referenced. It's not only three people. We are, as a matter of fact, today added two people to the team. So I can't, I can't argue a portion of an article that manipulates information. But I will tell you... Are you saying the information article about the layoffs is manipulating information? No, I said that it was partial information. So one of the other articles... I don't, I, again, I think it only said three people,

so it was partial information. And I really got to go. My last thing is, I know there were a lot of layoffs before you came. I'm sorry? There were a lot of layoffs at the company before you came. Oh my gosh. Dramatic layoffs. This goes back to the velocity of change and the scope of the ambition at X with roughly 25% of the original team. So it does speak to maybe what was going on

prior to acquisition. Because as one of the biggest advocates of then Twitter at my old job, the biggest frustration always was the complacency or lack of change or new product shipment. I remember one time I called one of my contacts there and said, I got approval at NBC Universal for resources because I really want you to build this video product for me. Okay. So it existed back then. But to get back to your question, you go from 8,000 to a little less than 1,500, or whatever that percentage is, 25% of the staff, you ship 100 product updates.

The overhaul of the infrastructure updates, you have brand safety tools, content moderation tools did not exist. But so are you hiring in this category? Hiring in this category. As I said, we just hired two people to the brand safety team today. And I have to say, I just brought in a partial new leadership team that have exquisite resumes who just joined the team from really pristine backgrounds who bring with them not only a network... In the election security or which category? No, no, broadly for the company. I said leadership team. And it seems like

some of those people are in the sort of content business, which I wish we had more time to talk about. Well, you'll be hearing some of those announcements in the next week or two. But thank you so much, everyone.

I got to go. I really appreciate it. Lindy Acrino, thank you for making the time for us today. Thank you for making the time for us today. Thank you. All right, Kara, it is now 2 a.m. on Thursday morning in New York.

You have flown from the Code Conference in Southern California to San Francisco. We have had a doozy of a day, I would say. It's your favorite word. Is it my favorite word or is it just the word I'm living in? Because I am tethered to you, Kara Swisher.

Well, you know, it's not a doozy. A CEO failed to do a good job. Let's say what happened. So, Yoel Roth ended that interview saying that he was rooting for the platform and rooting for Linda Iaccarino. It was a very kind ending. An hour later, Linda Iaccarino appeared on the stage with Julia Boorstin. They had a conversation. If you would call it that, go ahead. Linda was quite...

Agitated would be a word. Yeah, fixated on Yoel perhaps what happened is she she she got on stage and was obviously rattled by what Yoel had said except Yoel if you listened if you listened you just listened to this was very calm and actually complimentary towards her and had and gave her great hopes but you know I think she she had her talking points and she was hoping to use them on that stage, and she couldn't, given what had just occurred. And the problem she had was that Yoel was reasonable and not just saying, Twitter sucks, Elon sucks, this is terrible, you know what I mean? And in fact, was wishing her well. And so it made it really hard for her to do. And more to the point, besides being rattled, she didn't have

any information at her fingertips. Juliet was pressing her on numbers and specifics, and she couldn't answer. She hardly knew how many people were on Twitter on daily use. She sort of was like, I don't know, 250 million. Yeah, and we should also note she was pushing back on Yoel's numbers here. And it's hard to know with these numbers because people are just throwing out numbers, and it's like, well, we would like actual accurate numbers, but in a private company. Well, the problem is Twitter's not giving out actual accurate numbers, but in a private company. The problem is Twitter's not giving out actual accurate numbers. And so I thought Julia Borsten did a great, a fantastic job in that interview.

And yet, Linda Iaccarino left the stage in a hurry. On Twitter, Dan Primack is saying that this was, you know, I'm going to use his language. He said, well, they sandbagged her and Julia to some extent. I think they is you in this sentence. Dan Primack, who writes for Axios, also wrote that Linda runs one of the world's most powerful platforms, one that must make very tough and sometimes quick decisions, got to be able to roll with the punches. So, Kara, I'm going to ask you, I know you agree with the second part of that, and I do too. I had a text exchange with Dan, and I think we settled it.

I think he didn't. Okay, but settle it for the audience. Did you sandbag Linda Iaccarino? No. She found out early in the morning, and she could have made a decision to go first. They had the option to do that. She had plenty of time to figure it out. And she should have already had her points. I think the real issue is she was unprepared for that interview at all, even with or without Yoel. And Yoel was very reasonable. If you've listened to this, you understand, like, how could this have rattled her? He was very calm. He wished her well. He wasn't blaming her. He was focused on Elon and calling him a pedophile and is worried about content moderation. This is not stuff that should rattle a CEO. And it's certainly not someone who just given an interview

for the FT where she said, you know, I welcome speed and fast time innovation. And there's a quote in it that's very clear. It's like real time changes and she likes the speed. So this was fast. And if she's not able to handle it, I don't know what to say. She was, um, Lindy Ocarina's team, and she were informed on Wednesday morning, um, hours before the interview. I sent her a text at 7.30 in the morning, which they say they didn't get. Um, listen, she doesn't get back to me, and I may have had the wrong number, but everybody else was on the text, too. And then I believe that her team was they may have used. You know, they're trying to focus on when they were told versus that she was unprepared and she couldn't move in real time as a CEO. That's what CEOs do. And by the way, guess who moves in real time really well? Elon Musk. I've sprung questions to that guy that were really tough without telling him, without him knowing, and he was able to handle it.

And he doesn't melt down, and he didn't... He does threaten to leave. He does, once, once, but most of the time... I mean, in one interview, he threatened to leave two to three times, actually. I know he did. I know he did. Yes. But he didn't leave, and he answered questions. So let me just say, here's a compliment for Elon Musk. He's great in interviews,

and he doesn't know what's coming, and he's able to handle it. So in that regard, he's good as a CEO. Kara, you're supposed to retire from code. Just like to drop a bomb and leave. Let me just say, this is what we're supposed to do as journalists. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if we're doing our job. I thought Julia did a great, I thought actually Nilay Patel did amazing interviews. Casey Newton did amazing interviews. And Julia was a badass. She got a standing ovation at the Linda Iaccarino interview. She got a standing ovation. So did, well, Roth, which was interesting. But let me say, she did her job. And that's what she did. Linda Iaccarino did not do her job in that interview.

All right. Well, our job here is done. We'll be back next week with more. I'm going to read us the credits. Okay, great. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Megan Cunane, Megan Burney, and myself, Naima Raza. Special thanks to Andrea Lopez-Cruzado and Kate Gallagher. And a very special thanks to Michelle Berg and the whole wonderful team at Vox's Code Conference 2023. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are a CEO, but if not, you're a CEO in name only, a sign-o. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On With Kara

Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things. And it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system,

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