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Linda Yaccarino continues her portrayal of X as an anti-media company – a disruptive alternative for what she and Elon Musk see as the dusty, shattered fourth estate.
This is a controversial claim, especially at a time when President Donald Trump has declared war on the press. Yaccarino said that the platform’s numbers (as reported by the platform) back her up during a fireside talk with Anthony Pompliano on X at Possible in Miami this afternoon.
The platform’s CEO claims that X has amassed nearly 600 million monthly active users globally. This is a small increase from the 586 MAUs reported by X’s tools in January but not a significant increase over the 570 MAUs X claimed to have reached in September 2024.
Yet, almost a third of this user growth (31%) is coming from Gen Z – attracted, apparently, by their taste for authenticity and disposable money. Yaccarino cited their projected $36 trillion spending power by 2024. She said that X had become the world’s biggest culture signal. It has truly become the global town-square. “Where ideas collide and debate happen, truth rises, and everyone is welcome.” News app No. 1.
She said, “The new generation and population is fueled by the technology that has liberated information. All data and content consumption have changed forever.”
These comments are a twisted reinvention on Twitter’s original premise. Before Musk bought the social network in October 2023 it was known for being a hub of credible news and trusted sources. The billionaire is now pushing for X to become the source, arguing that unfiltered speech will replace what he calls “legacy media.” This shift can be seen in the way X handles hate speech, misinformation and other content that users would prefer to avoid. The company ditched many of its automated moderating systems in favor “Community Notes”which crowdsources fact checks and contexts from the user base. According to Yaccarino there are now 1 million “community noters” worldwide. She believes that the feature is “good” for the world because it “retrains us to respect truth”she said. “It’s really, really difficult for legacy media to fact-check and fight misinformation at the scale that X can do, and now Community Notes as the ecosystem leader,” said she.
However, the tool was not designed to be the sole source of content moderation. It was designed as a supplement to more robust systems such as internal review teams or AI tools that flag obvious falsehoods, and not to replace them. Since X launched the feature globally in December 2020, others have followed suit. From Meta to TikTok. They have decided that people don’t require journalism when they can rely on each other.
Yaccarino said, “We are super excited that Google, Meta, and more recently TikTok have partnered and followed our lead in a drastic ecosystem change for fact checking and aggressively combating misinformation.”
The AI is driving the platform’s positioning as the antidote for news if X’s upper management wants to do so. Yaccarion’s spin on Musk’s decision of selling X to his AI company xAI was that the move was a financial one. It’s widely seen as a money play — fold X in the AI boom and profit from the revenue bump. But it’s just as likely a “data play”: merging the companies would give xAI the digital exhaust of X users to help train their models.
Yaccarino said, “When you combine those two things, you have a profound differentiator, because the other AI offerings do not use real-time data from X and the super, super capabilities provided by X.” For better or for worse, X has its own uniqueness
Yaccarino, like many other platform CEOs in her conversation with Pompliano, was not afraid to praise her platform and criticize the competition.
She said, “If you compare X with the other platforms, they are where you go if you want to lean back or, dare I even say, tune out.” “X is the most attentive social platform compared to other platforms.” You’re leaning forward, you’re looking for information.
In comparison to her previous stage performances as CEO of one of the most talked-about and controversial platforms, Yaccarino was confident this time at Possible.
But, as Possible is an event for advertisers, there was no real insight into how X was able to influence those advertisers to spend money on the platform. It seems that the audience also shared this thought. Digiday asked executives in the queue for Inspiration Hall to tell them how they thought audience members would react this time, given the mixed reviews about X’s leadership and the X-related headlines over the last couple of years.
The opinions of two media agency executives, who asked to remain anonymous, were mixed. “I think that there is some simmering anger that could explode, but we’ll have to wait and see,” said a first agency exec who was barely audible while a DJ onstage spun ear-splitting Reggaeton, as the audience trickled in.
The second executive said, “It would be disrespectful” if she were heckled. “But we would like to hear assurances that ad-sales negotiations with X take place on the market and not in court,” added they.
Pompliano did not mention the brand safety issues that remain on the platform or the legal actions taken against advertisers who have been reluctant to market through X.
— Jim Cooper contributed reporting to this story
https://digiday.com/?p=577335
