The buzz out of the Code Conference this week is, naturally, all about the disastrous performance of X / Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who closed out the two-day affair in spectacular fashion. Vox’s Peter Kafka, who has been going to the conference since it started in 2008, called it “the weirdest session I’ve ever seen.” If I had to sum up the vibe as everyone trickled off to dinner afterward, it would be stunned disbelief. As for Yaccarino, she immediately fled the premises with her six-person security detail.
And looking back, she was absolutely in the right clearing out those communities.
She wasn’t controversial for banning /r/fatpeoplehate, she was controversial for banning it but not banning subs like /r/the_donald as well.
Was she? Any posts about “why isn’t X banned too?” were buried under an avalanche of reactionary tantrums about losing their platform to discuss hitting children. For the overwhelming majority of users, it was “this goes too far”, not “this doesn’t go far enough”.
Which means that realistically, she never got past the low hanging fruit. These were the days when a lot of these places still had plausible deniability so it was easy to pull in wider support.
My baseless guess is that she came in as CEO and noticed they were handing over some very predictable post histories every time there was a mass shooting but couldn’t come out and say “check out all these domestic terrorists” because it would damage the brand.