Soft Power May Determine The Fate Of Twitter

Billionaire Elon Musk announced last week that he has selected the NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino to be the new CEO of his star-crossed Twitter. Is the sound we hear one of another glass ceiling being broken, this time in the high-tech boys club of Silicon Valley?

Or is Yaccarino set to be another female executive edged up to and right over a slippery glass cliff?

The case for the latter is substantial. Musk has announced in advance that he intends to maintain full control of product design and technology which, in a tech company is, well, everything. Let us also not forget that he essentially got rid of communications, HR and that little thing called ‘content moderation.’

He no doubt has no plans to give up his penchant for impulsive and occasionally micromanaging business decisions. Nor is he likely to keep his thumbs in check and forego tweets that give even Twitter’s bread-and-butter advertisers pause. One is hard-pressed to find cases of global corporations that sustain what amounts to a power-sharing agreement, let alone a modus operandi where one party is a megastar. Who would want that job?

Yet, not so fast. Yaccarino — whose nickname is the “Velvet Hammer” — is by all accounts tough, battle-tested, and politically savvy in ways that Musk is not. Moreover, she understands the slippery underbelly at the nexus of advertising, social media, and public perceptions. Among others, she has taken on the venerable ratings powerhouse Nielsen for miscounting viewers.

If she uses soft power, the ability to set informal norms and standards within Twitter, across the Twitterverse, and throughout the social media world, she could quite possibly be a significant, maybe even transformative, figure. Here are three ways.

Improve The Global Town Square

Foremost, Yaccarino will need to recognize that the debate over free speech on Twitter has become as corrosive as some of the speech itself. Twitter is losing this war by attrition. There is another way. Yaccarino could combine Musk’s fealty to free speech with an equally important clause of the First Amendment, free assembly, and push hard to ensure that more of the debates that take place on the platform are moderated to prevent racism, sexism, ethnic bigotry, and threats. The way to reduce such content is by diluting it with better content, not through censorship.

If Twitter really wants to be the global town square, then it needs to start seriously investing in live-streaming events that hew toward the likes of C-Span, TED Talks, and conference debates. Such a push need not blacklist content providers or debates, but it could establish a consistent center of gravity that is civil. (Isn’t this what the Republican lawmakers in Tennessee presumably demanded — decorum for assembly?)

Champion Women

Another opportunity for Yaccarino to exercise soft power lies at the intersection of the metaverse, the digital worlds which allow for expanding commerce, politics, and play, and the world of generative artificial intelligence, which has stunned the world of intellectual property rights and privacy like a meteor. Twitter, as Musk surely understands, will not be able to stand by while the likes of Google GOOG , Facebook, TikTok, and others make a land grab for these territories.

When such new spaces are created, however, one demographic group has borne the brunt of the rough-and-tumble: women. The amount of harassment, exploitation, and threats faced on a daily basis by women increased dramatically with the ascendance of the internet. This is set to become worse in the metaverse-AI mashup world we are entering. Someone such as Yaccarino, with resources and a significant platform, could champion industry norms that begin to turn the tide.

Twitter could, for example, set up algorithms to detect and rapidly delete deep fake videos of girls and women. It could set up hotlines so doxxing investigations are handled as swiftly as credit card fraud complaints. No framework will be perfect, but what we have could be so much better.

Pioneer New Norms

Finally, Twitter is big enough to accomplish great things, and yet small enough to be nimble. Yaccarino could pioneer new norms in privacy and transparency with respect to online commerce and debates. Rather than have consumers fly blindly into social media or transactions, they could have a dashboard that gives them much more insight into, and control over, what is happening with their online data. Someone as ‘velvety’ as Yaccarino could well be the person to pull this off.

Is Yaccarino crashing a glass ceiling? Or headed over a glass cliff? It’s too soon to tell. But she will certainly have large opportunities to be a transformative figure if she can partner with Musk in a far-sighted quest to remake the digital world.