Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino on Tuesday tweeted a defense of the temporary cap announced on July 1 on the number of tweets users can read in a day. It was her first public comment on the limits, which owner Elon Musk said were meant to discourage “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
The former NBCUniversal advertising chief’s role at Twitter is to rebuild its relationship with advertisers, who historically make up 90 percent of its revenue. Her selection as the platform’s new leader in early June is a good bet to do that. She has deep media business relationships and could help restore the trust of prominent marketers that have fled the company since Musk bought it last October.
However, the CEO might be in for a rough patch just over a month into her tenure. During her first full day on the job, she hosted an audio space with anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr. that quickly turned into a fiery exchange over whether pharmaceutical drugs were to blame for the recent school shootings. The event wasn’t the only hiccup in her first day, as the company faced significant technical difficulties during an earlier live event with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
But despite her initial stumbles, Yaccarino made clear in her Twitter thread that she’s still pushing ahead with plans to revitalize the platform. In addition to launching full-screen, sound-on video ads in the feed, she’s also working to boost the profile of Twitter celebrities, political figures, and content creators that can draw in advertisers.
A week after she started the job, Yaccarino had already held two gatherings with Twitter workers. The informal gatherings, dubbed Tea Time, were billed as an opportunity for her to get to know employees and for them to get to know her. One was held in the New York office and the other in the San Francisco headquarters.
During her second Tea Time, Yaccarino asked the staff to help the company “address many of the challenges we are facing right now.” She added that she is focused on making Twitter more transparent and open, which will be a vital part of the platform’s long-term strategy to attract new users.
The latest controversy involving the site’s limit on the number of tweets per day may not hurt Yaccarino in the short term, as the limit was only in effect for a few days, and many people who had hit the maximum could remove the limitations. However, if the issue continues to dog Twitter, it might make marketers skittish about spending on the platform in the future. That would be a setback for a company struggling to generate more revenue.