Twitter CEO Says New Policy in Place to ‘Label’ And ‘Deamplify’ Hate Speech on Platform

Squawk on the Street’s Sara Eisen interviewed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino in an interview out Thursday and pushed the social media leader on the platform’s safety standards.

Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal ad executive, has the difficult task of increasing revenue at Twitter, now known as X, which means convincing advertisers that the platform is a safe place to spend their dollars.

As an ad executive, Yaccarino recalled feeling that “Twitter was safe,” a point Eisen quickly pushed back on.

“But not all brands, I mean a lot of brands have left,” Eisen interjected.

“Okay, hang on. I’m going. I hear you. And I want to take that last ten years and put it in perspective, because by all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago,” Yaccarino claimed.

“Since acquisitions, we have built brand safety and content moderation tools that have never existed before at this company,” she continued, adding:

And we’ve introduced a new policy to your specific point about hate speech called freedom of speech, not reach. So if you’re going to post something that’s illegal or against the law, you’re gone. Zero tolerance. But more importantly, if you are going to post something that is lawful but it’s awful, you get labeled, you get labeled, you get amplified, which means it cannot be shared. And it is certainly demonetized. Back to your direct point about brands, brands, brands, safety.

So they are protected from the risk of being next to that content. And it’s also why it’s really important to note that once a post is labeled and it can’t be shared and the user sees that, 30% of the time they take it down themselves, staggeringly, they take it down. And that reducing that hateful content from being seen is one of the best examples how X is committed to encouraging healthy behavior online.

A study reported on by the LA Times in April found hate speech on Twitter doubled since Elon Musk bought the platform last October and gutted the company with massive layoffs. “According to data collected by researchers from USC, UCLA, UC Merced and Oregon State University, daily use of hate speech by those who previously posted hateful tweets nearly doubled after Musk finalized the sale. And the overall volume of hate speech also doubled sitewide,” reported the Times.

Watch the full clip above via CNBC.