NO THANKS: New Twitter CEO Once Pushed Elon Musk to Reinstate Orwellian ‘Influence Council’

May 15th, 2023 12:20 PM

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s newly appointed World Economic Forum-tied CEO for the platform recently tried to corner him into committing to reinstalling some of the same Orwellian censorship structures of the old regime. Gee, what a shocker (sarcasm).

Then-NBCUniversal Chair of Global Advertising and Partnerships Linda Yaccarino pressed Musk during an interview at the 2023 MMA Global POSSIBLE Miami Event on whether he would pledge to reinstate an “influence council” akin to the old censorship-obsessed regime. “So Twitter 1.0 had a very well-populated, much loved influence council,” Yaccarino mourned. She propped the “council” up as a supposedly necessary “recurring feedback loop from your key stakeholders — your advertisers — where they had recurring access or would have recurring access to you.” 

The kind of so-called “influence” Yaccarino pushed involved giving advertisers some control over Twitter’s “product development, ad safety” and — of course — “content moderation,” which is a cute euphemism for censorship.

Musk didn’t take the bait and deflected Yaccarino’s attempts to corner him. “It’s totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places. But it is not cool to try to say what Twitter will do.” Musk was adamant that if his stance meant “losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount.” Musk also asserted that a so-called influence council would make him “wary of creating a backlash among the public because the public thinks that their views are being determined by” elitists. 

But this begs the question in retrospect: why would Musk appoint a clearly liberal individual to lead a platform that is apparently not nearly as committed to protecting free speech? Yaccarino chairs the Taskforce on Future of Work and sits on the Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee at the globalist WEF. WEF has actively promoted asinine views pushing Big Tech censorship.

Yaccarino even scolded Musk for his habit of tweeting past 3:00 a.m and tried to get him to commit to muzzling himself:

So after 3:00 a.m., you travel all over the world — Lord knows how you handle timezones in space. Will you commit to be a little more specific and not tweet after 3:00 a.m.?

Musk responded by asserting that while he would “aspire” to tweet less in the wee hours, it would be “wrong” to create a dynamic where his activity would be influenced. “That would be very wrong because that would be a diminishment of freedom of speech.”

Conservatives are under attack. Contact Twitter at (415) 222-9670 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.