By admitting that hardly any teens use X, Linda Yaccarino avoided scrutiny in the otherwise heated hearing on child exploitation.
The most remarkable moment of the Senate hearing where five tech CEOs testified about child exploitation was when Mark Zuckerberg was forced to stand up, turn around, and face the audience full of parents of children who had been harmed or died from suicide — and apologize.
Zuckerberg bore the brunt of the grilling, especially over the fact that an email sent by a Facebook executive in 2021 asking for more staff to work on teen well-being was apparently ignored by Zuckerberg. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew also was frequently put in the hot seat, but a big chunk of that was over the app’s ties to China, not teen safety.
But Yaccarino, who has stumbled under questioning about X’s business by far more friendly interviewers, managed to get out of the hearing relatively unscathed.
In her opening remarks, Yaccarino proudly said that X does not cater to teens and children and dropped a shocking statistic: Less than 1% of X users in the US are under 18.
