Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk has announced longtime NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter.

Linda Yaccarino

On Thursday, Musk tweeted, “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Tiwtter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks! My role will transition to being exec chair and CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”

On Friday, he officially announced Yaccarino as CEO, saying, “I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter! [Yaccarino] will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design and new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.”

Despite Musk ensuring Twitter users that his “commitment to open source transparency and accepting a wide range of viewpoints remains unchanged,” there are still significant concerns being expressed by right-wing Twitter users.

Musk’s announcement was quickly met with confusion and concern from his right-wing supporters who worry that Yaccarino will return the social media platform to its anti-conservative biases and selectively silence free speech.

Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino

One of the red flags concerning many of Musk’s followers is that Yaccarino is the Chairman of the left-wing World Economic Forum’s Taskforce on Future of Work, and sits on the WEF’s Media, Entertainment, and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee.

People have also taken issue with a couple of videos from Yaccarino that have been circulating on Twitter in which she expresses far-left, “woke” ideology.

In one of these videos, she tells students at Penn State University, her alma mater, to “mask up or pack up.”

“Just keep your distance, get your hands washed often, get tested often, and wear your mask,” Yaccarino said.

In a second video being shared on social media, Yaccarino discusses the importance of social justice within her company while working for NBCUniversal.

At a marketing conference in April, Musk was actually interviewed by Yaccarino, during which she asked him about reinstating heavy content moderation so that advertisers will be willing to invest more money into Twitter.

 

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