Twitter has been more than a little chaotic since Elon Musk's messy acquisition of the platform last year. For one thing, it is no longer called Twitter — Musk nixed the bluebird, christening these early stages of his budding everything app simply "X."
For another, even as Musk promises to pay the legal bills of people fired for posting on Twitter, and even as Musk works to expand his new ad-revenue sharing program with creators, the platform is struggling.
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Musk said July 15 that Twitter is "still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load."
The persistent dip in advertisers comes as some researchers have noted the rise in hate speech on Twitter; the platform filed a lawsuit against those same researchers last week.
But, according to Yaccarino, the platform is "pretty close to breakeven."
"We're pacing well. When you think about the incredible cost discipline before I arrived at the company, I get to shift from this cost discipline to growth," Yaccarino told CNBC. She added that even as X's subscription service is growing, there is some hope that advertisers will return as well.
Yaccarino said she has been hosting "personal direct conversations with CMOs and CEOs and we cover a lot of ground. I focus on those that have either maybe paused or reduced spending, to remind them about the power of the platform and the power of the user base and the economic potential of them partnering with us again."
She explained that X's very nature as a free-speech-first platform makes it an incredibly viable business because it is a "vibrant" platform that takes advantage of real-time events.
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"What a great place for advertisers to participate and take advantage of the real-time communication that's going on," Yaccarino said, adding that, though X is not claiming responsibility for the recent 'Barbenheimer' phenomenon, "that's where the conversation started."
Yaccarino, addressing the complaints of hate speech and vitriolic content across Twitter, said that "by all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago."
She touted new brand safety and content moderation tools, in addition to the "freedom of speech, not reach policy," as part of an explanation behind her suggestion that "99.9% of all posted impressions are healthy."
Many users, however, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have been skeptical of this assertion.
But when asked to define what "healthy" means to X, Yaccarino reiterated her "freedom of speech, not reach" policy, saying that the core of free speech involves unsavory speech.
"Free expression at its core, will really only survive when someone you don't agree with says something you don't agree with," she said.
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