X CEO Linda Yaccarino On ‘Hate Speech’ Policy At X: We ‘Deamplify’ Posts That Are ‘Lawful But Awful’
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said during an interview this week that the company has new hate speech policies that “deamplify” content that is deemed to be “lawful but awful.”
Yaccarino, the former advertising head at NBCUniversal, made the remarks during a CNBC interview with Sara Eisen on “Squawk on the Street.”
Eisen pressed Yaccarino about brands that have abandoned advertising campaigns on the platform since Elon Musk purchased the company, formerly known as Twitter, last year.
“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 said. “Since acquisitions, we have built brand safety and content moderation tools that have never existed before at this company.”
Yaccarino said that X has “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 deamplified, which means it cannot be shared. And it is certainly demonetized.”
Yaccarino said that policies protect brands “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,” she claimed. “And that reducing that hateful content from being seen is one of the best examples how X is committed to encouraging healthy behavior online.”
WATCH:
Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino: "By all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago." pic.twitter.com/tXDdpebNu8
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 10, 2023