The Highwire with Del Bigtree - MUSK’S PUZZLING PICK FOR TWITTER CEO

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Elon Musk’s puzzling pick for CEO, Linda Yaccarino, has the twittersphere troubled. With deep ties to the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Ad Council, a war-time propaganda tool activated against the American people to increase COVID compliance, many question why Musk has made such an appointment. The HighWire analyzes Musk’s move and what it means for Twitter’s future.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

There's these ebbs and these flows and there's just small windows because things are moving very fast right now. One of those windows right now is Twitter. And that is really at the forefront. It's the largest social media company right now that has somewhat of a free open platform for people to disseminate ideas, open debate. And it's revolutionizing the news industry and the generation of this information technology age that we're in. And Elon Musk's got the head of that. It's $44 billion takeover of Twitter. Twitter, obviously made a lot of headlines, but he did something really interesting shortly after

the takeover in December of 2022. He put up a poll on his Twitter. And this is what it looked like. He asked this, should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll. Well, 57.5% said yes. And you can see there, over 363 million eyes were on that poll. So that just gives you an idea about what type of influence this platform has. So it took, It took Musk about five months to find a replacement, and this is in the media now, his replacement. We'll go back to Twitter to look at that. He posted this on Twitter just recently.

He says this. I'm excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter. Linda at Linda Yacch will focus primarily on business operations while I focus on product design and new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app. Linda in turn responded by saying, thank you, Elon Musk. I've long been inspired by your vision to create a brighter future. I'm excited to help bring this vision to Twitter and transform this business together.

Now, who is this woman? She has been the head of advertising at NBCUniversal since 2011. During that time, during her tenure there, she generated more than $100 billion in ad sales. So you can see why Musk is choosing on that front to bring her in. Twitter needs money. Twitter needs ad sales. It needs to generate revenue. And it says so.

in this article here it says Twitter's new CEO Linda the Yaccarino has a fearsome to do list. In the article, it lists a couple of those, which is win back corporations and celebs, play nice with advertisers and get profitable. So that's obviously on his mind in bringing this woman in to head as the CEO. But what's interesting is they just had an exchange at a public conference of high-level advertisers just a couple months ago. And this is what it looked like. Take a listen.

It's very telling. So after 3 a.m. You travel all over the world. Lord knows how you handle time zones in space. Will you commit to be a little more specific and not tweet after 3 a.m.? People in this room would like to see that. We'll make them feel more confident.

I will aspire to tweet less after 3 a.m. But I mean, it is important that, you know, I mean, if I would say, yes, you can influence me, that would be wrong. that would be very wrong because that would be a diminishment of freedom of speech but I want to be specific about influencing

it's more of an open feedback loop for the advertising experts in this room to help develop Twitter into a place where they will be excited about investing more money product development

ad safety content moderation that's what the influence is yeah I think It's totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places. But it is not cool to try to say what Twitter will do. And if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount.

Wow. That was before she was chosen to be the CEO. So you can see how her messaging, she's saying, can we influence basically your speech? we have some content moderation, these soft kind of buzzwords, but at the bottom line here, we're talking about limiting speech, limiting information that's on Twitter. You know, watching that, Jeffrey, it reminds me of that, you know, fable, I guess, you would call it with the frog and the scorpion. The scorpion wants to get across the river and says, we give me a rise because I'm afraid you'll stay. No, I won't. I've got to get across the river.

and then the middle of the river, the scorpions, things, and they both drown, the frog says, what are you doing? It says, I'm sorry, it's my nature. I just, I don't know. I mean, just looking at that, you can tell. First of all, I want to just take a moment to make this point. Folks, this is why I tell you at the top of every show, we have no sponsors on this show.

When she says, we want to be friendly with the advertisers, we need to have the advertisers design what will make Twitter exciting. What makes Twitter exciting is here. human beings and conversation and truth. Not what we're being advertised with. And by the way, it is the sponsors that creates the censorship. It's the sponsors that decide, well, we're not paying if you talk about this. And do you not think pharma is going to be one of the biggest sponsors in there once again

controlling Twitter the same way it controls all of our news agencies? I mean, this is absolutely insane that this is even the conversation we're having. But this is why I'm telling you, the only way we can do what we're doing here on the Highwire is by your help, by your sponsorship. You are our sponsors. If we decided that in order to do more legal work or do more of the things that are helping change this world, we're just going to bring in a couple of vitamin companies. You know what? Maybe a water purification company. Oh, but wait a minute, the vitamin company doesn't want me talking about Ivermectin. And the water purification company, you know, doesn't want me talking about, you know, the crystal clear water

coming from my well or anything like that or, you know, all of these different things. They're going to weigh in. That's what sponsors do this. I don't want to be next to that story. And now all of a sudden, you're going down this slippery slope that ends in complete and total censorship, and nothing is exciting about it. So if you want to keep the high wire exciting, if you want to keep us being allowed to even talk about the legal cases that are coming up right after Jeffrey Jackson, will you please become a recurring donor right now? Just go to the top of the screen. Just hit Donate to ICANN. I want to stop the total control of language and censorship. Amendment rights by supporting the high wire. Not only are we allowed to speak and tell you what was

happening when everyone else got it wrong, we're looking for $23 a month for 2023. Not only we're telling you what they got wrong, we are suing and going to court to drive these things to protect our First Amendment rights, to protect our body integrity. It is so important and there's so much to do. You cannot tell that we are under massive attack right now, but we're winning. You want to bet on the winning team, bet on I can right now and please become a recurring donor. We plan on helping you change our world. All right, let's get back to this crazy story. It's so depressing because I had so much hope for Twitter and for Elon Musk.

And I still believe as he's sitting there, I think he feels like somehow Twitter's going to survive this. I just don't see how. Tell me more about this. Great choice he's made. Right. And perhaps he sees a middle road here. that's that's what his messaging would would indicate but you know also in that interview the Akarino asked if if musk would bring back at twitter's influence council which twitter kind of

one point oh before musk had and was kind of kicked out of there when musk came in and he gave a similar answer not really committing to it but you can see i mean it's it's it's really fascinating and helpful for the public to have that open debate for them to watch that debate as opposed behind closed doors but let's look at her a little further now let's look at some of her her other uh things she's pushed for. So this is another article covering it, who is Linda Yaccarino, new Twitter CEO, CBS News. In there, it says this. As chair of the ad council, a nonprofit that promotes public service announcement, she garnered support from various entities, including the White House, to design a vaccination campaign featuring Pope Francis that reached more than 200 million Americans.

What was that? That was for the COVID vaccine. And if you remember, here's some of the articles and the headlines at the time of that ad campaign is really the biggest campaign since polio. Council Spear has $50 million education effort for COVID-19 vaccines. Here's another one. Ad Council's Challenge. Persuade skeptics to believe in COVID vaccines. Forget about the science. We need persuasion.

She was a part of that. She was on the board of the ad council. But now, you know, okay, so she's tried to get people to mask up so we can get back to normal. She's behind the ad council to push the COVID vaccine. Great. But she's in Twitter now. She's in the business end. Can she optimize this platform?

What does she think about the dissemination? of this information than the news. Well, this is her in 2018 at, interestingly enough, a World Economic Forum talk. Take a listen to what she has to say about the news situation at that time. I think the more complicated issue when it comes to fake news is that the younger generation really doesn't experience or consume news with the same filters that what I would call traditional news or older folks, maybe some of us up on this panel, were once raised, whether you had a news reporter, a news presenter, that you trusted and that you received your news from,

those largely don't exist anymore. The younger generation does not differentiate. They're used to seeing someone's phone cam, on site somewhere telling them what's going and they take that as real and news. So real news and education and discipline is very, very important. I mean, it's literally like the neanderthal's media trying to just cling to the relevance. We got to like just push social media back into what it was always supposed to be the media we can control, not the one we can't.

And that's such a teachable clip right there because it's, remember, that was 2018. So that was before COVID where I would argue the media and government health agencies lost the most amount of trust they've ever lost in such a short period of time. So she's saying young people don't have filters anymore. And in her, there's no more trusted news anchors. Well, in her paradigm, within her paradigm of these legacy media companies, she's right. That doesn't exist anymore.

And what happened was trust migrated. It open source. It decentralized to the people, if you will. So I would argue the young people do have filters that she argues they don't have. They just have filters that of other people they trust. that's outside these legacy medias. So, you know, another piece of this puzzle with Yacarino is part of her background. So if you go to her LinkedIn page under the organization she is a part of, you can see here,

it says World Economic Forum Executive Chair. And if you go down to that highlighted region down there, it's 2019, by the way, to present. She says, Yaccarino is the chairman of the WF's task force on future of work and sits on the WEF's media entertainment and culture industry, governor's steering committee, She's also highly engaged with the value in media initiative. So, you know, arguably she still is at the WEF and she's part of steering the media culture out there as an influencer. How much sway does that have on her? How much will Musk, you know, take her under the wing?

Does she still believe in 2018 what she believed in that clip? So, you know, on Twitter, in true Twitter fashion, she was pushed by an activist. We've covered on the show before named Billboard Chris. And he put out a very, very long tweet with some of the issues. And he said she wanted advertising execs be part of an influence council. Basically, you can see here, she's trying to push a woke ideology by limiting speech. That's a natural inclination. Now, it was seen by over 1.7 million people.

And Elon Musk actually responded to that. He said this, I hear your concerns, but don't judge too early. I'm adamant about defending free speech, even if it means losing money. So this is where we're at right now. And Musk took to Twitter once again shortly after Yaccarino was brought on as CEO. And he says this, as soon as Linda Yock is ready, we will do with Spaces where you can ask us anything. And if people aren't familiar with that spaces, this is kind of an open, really just like an audio Zoom call on Twitter that everyone can be a part of. Obviously, everyone won't be able to ask a question.

But I think at that point you'll see at least there's an attempt for this open dialogue here. maybe you'll see some more transparency be shown on her position, what they're just, what they're trying to do on this. But everyone look out for that. If you want to be a part of this, get on that Twitter spaces. I think people should get to be a part of that. That may be the last moment of free free speech that ever takes place on Twitter. I'm not hopeful at all. I mean, I just think you got to, you know, you judge a profit by their fruits. The fruits of this tree are horrid, they're rotten. There's nothing about it. That looks good to me. And I just want to say this. It's amazing. I think it was just a week ago or so that we were announcing that it looks like Tucker Carlson is looking to Twitter as a free space where he might be able to speak his truth. Tucker, I hate to say it, but I don't think that's going to last very long. So I'm just going to say this right now. Tucker, if that all falls apart and you give us a call. I have a bunch of donors out there right now that are signing up to make sure they're recurring donors so that we can offer you the deal of a century to keep speaking the truth. Anyone like that. I would love to be able to support. And by the way, folks, one of the things we don't talk a lot about is all the technology we are currently building so that I've never, ever taken for granted that Twitter or any of these companies will be there for us, Facebook. We continue to work on technologies behind the scenes that we're going to be ramping in as they are ready so that we will always be a platform.

And probably for more and more voices in the future, your donations make that possible for us. And it's really, it's such an important story.