Topic: Media Research Center
Twitter's newly appointed CEO, Linda Yaccarino, has indisputable right-wing bona fides: President Trump appointed her to serve on a White House commission and she follows numerous right-wing and far-right Twitter accounts. But that's not far-right enough for the Media Research Center. Joseph Vazquez devoted a May 15 post to being mad that Vaccarino once argued in favor of content moderation on Twitter -- which he insists on framing as "censorship" without explaining why hate and misinformation must be allowed to spread unchecked:
Twitter owner Elon Musk’s newly appointed World Economic Forum-tied CEO for the platform recently tried to corner him into committing to reinstalling some of the same Orwellian censorship structures of the old regime. Gee, what a shocker (sarcasm).
Then-NBCUniversal Chair of Global Advertising and Partnerships Linda Yaccarino pressed Musk during an interview at the 2023 MMA Global POSSIBLE Miami Event on whether he would pledge to reinstate an “influence council” akin to the old censorship-obsessed regime. “So Twitter 1.0 had a very well-populated, much loved influence council,” Yaccarino mourned. She propped the “council” up as a supposedly necessary “recurring feedback loop from your key stakeholders — your advertisers — where they had recurring access or would have recurring access to you.”
The kind of so-called “influence” Yaccarino pushed involved giving advertisers some control over Twitter’s “product development, ad safety” and — of course — “content moderation,” which is a cute euphemism for censorship.
Musk didn’t take the bait and deflected Yaccarino’s attempts to corner him. “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.” Musk was adamant that if his stance meant “losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount.” Musk also asserted that a so-called influence council would make him “wary of creating a backlash among the public because the public thinks that their views are being determined by” elitists.
But this begs the question in retrospect: why would Musk appoint a clearly liberal individual to lead a platform that is apparently not nearly as committed to protecting free speech? Yaccarino chairs the Taskforce on Future of Work and sits on the Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee at the globalist WEF. WEF has actively promoted asinine views pushing Big Tech censorship.
Vazquez didn't mention that his defintion of "free speech" on Twitter that must be allowed to spread unchec apparently includes hate speech -- it's indisputable that anti-Semitism has spiked on Twitter since Musk took over. As a result of this, advertisers are fleeing the platform; Twitter ad revenue dropped by more than half since last year -- after all, no advertiers wants their ad to be posted next to a hate-filled tweet. (One might call it a case of "go anti-woke, go broke.") Meanwhile, Yaccarino has done the requisite sucking up to Musk that presumably helped her get the job.Also, Musk has made a mess of Twitter's finances in other ways, refusing to pay bills for rent, cloud services and other things, and Yaccarino is trying to fix that.
If Twitter continues to be overrun by hate speech, it will scare users away who want nothing to do with that. Yaccarino appears to understand that. Musk and Vazquez do not. Yaccarino wants to save the company; Musk and Vazquez want to own the libs.
