- Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino says it's time for the platform to enter "Twitter 2.0."
- In an email to employees, Yaccarino said: "You should have the freedom to speak your mind."
Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino is sharing her vision for "Twitter 2.0" — and it sounds a lot like owner Elon Musk's ambitions.
In an email sent Monday to Twitter employees, Yaccarino said it's her mission to turn Twitter into "the world's most accurate real-time information source."
"That's not an empty promise," she wrote, later sharing the email — with some slight tweaks — in a public thread on Twitter. "That's OUR reality."
Yaccarino also echoed Musk's goals, saying Twitter must transform the "global town square" in order to "drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about the things that matter most to us."
"Have you ever been talking with someone particularly insightful and thought, you should have the freedom to speak your mind?" she wrote on Twitter. "We all should."
The social-media platform has "the opportunity to reach across aisles, create new partnerships, celebrate new voices, and build something together that can change the world," she said.
Yaccarino took over for Musk after his rocky start leading the social-media platform.
Musk marked his purchase of Twitter by declaring himself a "free-speech absolutist" but spent much of his tenure at the helm wading into fights on the platform and making sudden, dramatic shifts in strategy.
Musk has flirted with right-wing provocateurs on the site and now regularly shares posts with anti-transgender, anti-vaccine, and conspiracy-theory content.
Last week he shared a video about gender identity posted by a right-wing commentator and declared that "every parent should watch this" — even though his platform had flagged it for violating its rules on hateful content.
His moves to reinstate controversial accounts and loosen moderation have driven away advertisers, with some reportedly using Twitter's own tools to keep their brands away from his tweets.
In his first 25 days at the helm of Twitter, half of Twitter's top 100 ditched the platform. In December 2022, revenue reportedly fell 40% year over year.
Musk has insisted that the advertisers he initially drove away have returned.
But leaked internal documents obtained by The New York Times showed that Twitter's ad revenue was down 59% year over year and the platform regularly failed to meet sales projections in the US.
His decision to monetize verification by removing the blue check marks from legacy accounts unless they pay him a monthly fee has not gone well either. It was roundly mocked, and celebrities discovered Twitter kept their check marks even though they didn't want to pay Musk the fee.
That leaves Yaccarino to clean up quite a mess. An ad-industry veteran, she led NBCUniversal's $13 billion global ad business. She was also behind the company's push into streaming and has experience selling digital-video ads.
Whether she'll be able to make Musk's dream into a moneymaking reality, though, remains to be seen.