4 urgent tasks for new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino

Yaccarino, who assumes Twitter’s nominally top job today—owner and erstwhile CEO Elon Musk will of course be hanging over her shoulder—should be the perfect person to play firefighter in this case. As global ad chief at NBCUniversal, she was in charge of handling advertisers, and they’re the biggest problem facing Twitter right now. 

According to the New York Times, U.S. ad revenue is down 59% year on year. Given that ad revenue accounts for almost all of Twitter’s income, it’s no surprise that the company’s worth has plummeted by around two-thirds since Musk began his erratic reign. 

So that’s the overarching problem Yaccarino has to deal with. However, bringing those advertisers back will mean undoing the damage that has scared them away. To that end, here’s a quick rundown of Yaccarino’s four most urgent tasks:

1) Focus on making Twitter safer and more trustworthy. The platform has never been the safest space, but hate speech and misinformation have thrived under Musk’s leadership. Nobody wants to advertise against either of those things, and they certainly don’t want to fall victim to impersonation under a paid-verification-but-with-no-real-authentication system. Last week’s resignations of trust and safety chief Ella Irwin and brand safety exec A.J. Brown were blaring sirens. Their replacements need to have confidence that the CEO has their backs if they do their jobs right. And European regulators need to be urgently convinced that Twitter is taking disinformation seriously—because if not, they’re going to come down on the company like a ton of bricks when the Digital Services Act (which allows fines of up to 6% of global revenue) starts applying to Twitter in a few months’ time.

2) Make Twitter neutral-ish again. Was Twitter too lefty before Musk? That’s debatable, but what’s not is that Musk has seemed only interested in pleasing more right-wing users over recent months. Naked partisanship is not attractive to most users nor to advertisers—and it would create all sorts of crises as the U.S. heads into an election. Twitter needs to reposition itself as being broadly welcoming, and not a service that’s tipping the scales one way or another.

3) Stability, please. Musk’s heavy layoffs definitely made Twitter less technically stable, as evidenced not just by features that flicker in and out of functionality (like tweet translation), but also by last month’s glitch-plagued launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential run. Yaccarino needs to get all that in order—but, just as important, she needs to demonstrate stable leadership. Musk’s relentless pursuit of his whims and notions has provided good rubbernecking fodder, but enough already. 

4) Think globally again. For all of Musk’s libertarian, free-speech rhetoric, Twitter has under his leadership been incredibly ready to cave into authoritarian pressure outside the U.S. In India, it blocked posts relating to a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ahead of the Turkish election, it effectively lent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan some support by censoring opposition accounts. If Twitter is going for global growth, it needs to be trustworthy.

If Yaccarino can pull off the above, then Twitter will be well positioned to both survive and perhaps morph into that X everything-app that Musk seems to want. If not, its decline will continue, possibly at speed. No pressure, then.

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David Meyer

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.

NEWSWORTHY

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple’s first new product category in years is likely to be a stand-alone headset named Reality Pro that will handle virtual reality and augmented reality. Analysts estimate Apple could sell between 150,000 and 1 million of the headsets in its first year. But it’s still below similar products already on the market like Meta’s second-generation Quest virtual reality headset model that shipped 10 million units in the year after its release. But if it can use the content available on the App Store and in the native software ecosystem, the headset will have a strong base to build off of.

The Fortune 500’s top tech companies. Amazon (No. 2), Apple (No. 4), and Alphabet (No. 8) snatched three of the top 10 spots on Fortune’s 69th annual ranking of the biggest U.S. companies by revenue. Apple remained the most profitable company on the list for the eighth time in nine years, with a record $99.8 billion in earnings last year. Other tech giants made the list, including Microsoft (No. 13) and Tesla (No. 50), which grew its revenues by nearly a factor of 12 from six years ago.

TikTok users can easily find tobacco content. In the current version of TikTok, searches for the term “vape” and other tobacco-related searches return videos that normalize and glorify tobacco and nicotine use, often featuring young users. Tests that Fortune ran on TikTok’s tobacco-related content found that the platform often strays from its stated policies. And while platforms like TikTok don’t accept advertising or user accounts from tobacco companies, they have no oversight of influencer brand deals, making it possible that tobacco companies have agreements with individuals. This follows a report last month from the U.S. Surgeon General that called on policymakers to develop health and safety standards around “substance abuse” content for children on social media.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

181 

—The number of hours that former Stable Diffusion intern Eric Hallahan is still waiting to be paid for after sending an invoice to the company last August. He’d worked 300 hours total. Forbes reported that multiple former employees said wages and payroll taxes have been repeatedly delayed or unpaid.

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Spotify lays off 200 as it reworks podcast division, by Chris Morris

Nicola Mendelsohn battled an incurable cancer on her way to becoming a top Meta exec. Now she’s trying to solve the Facebook parent’s growth crisis, by Emma Hinchliffe

BEFORE YOU GO

The tech behind Across the Spider-Verse. The latest Spider-Man opened in U.S. and Canadian theaters, generating $120.5 million at the box office, more than tripling the debut of the 2018 animated original. The movie, starring Shameik Moore as Miles Morales and Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen, required a crew of 1,000 artists and technicians and involved new feats like a watercolor and mood ring simulation tool for the world of Gwen’s character. 

“There were a couple of programmers that were a humongous part of our crew,” producer Chris Miller told IndieWire, “whose job it was to facilitate all this stuff. It’s easy to say the world should drip away and the color should change around [Gwen] as her mood changes. But someone had 18 months of R&D to figure out how to teach the computer to paint it.”