Elon Musk’s X yesterday (April 2) announced two new hires in its safety team amidst growing pressure from Congress and tension with advertisers. Kylie McRoberts, already an X staffer, was named head of safety to oversee the company’s global safety team. Yale Cohen, a former executive at Publicis Media, was hired as head of brand safety and advertiser solutions.
McRoberts will be the third person to lead X’s safety team since Musk took over the platform in October 2022. Her predecessor, Ella Irwin, resigned in June 2023. In X’s announcement, McRoberts is credited for building out the company’s new Safety Center of Excellence, located in Austin, Texas. X announced in January that it was building the center prior to CEO Linda Yaccarino’s appearance before Congress that month, where she and other tech CEOs testified on child safety and exploitation on social media platforms. Musk pledged that 100 content moderators would work at the center. The move was a 180-degree change from when he bought the platform and immediately fired many content moderators.
Both new hires are tasked to address issues that Musk previously seemed unbothered by. The latter half of 2023 was a saga of Musk falling out with X’s advertisers. Major media companies including Netflix and The Walt Disney Company pulled ads from X after a report from media watchdog Media Matters showed that their ads were placed alongside hateful posts. Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger had a public spat over the matter during a conference in November 2023.
A number of tech executives and even Tesla investors have disapproved of Musk’s behavior on X, specifically his interactions with problematic posts and his own problematic rhetoric. Last November, Musk replied “You have said the actual truth” to an antisemitic post on X, which prompted backlash from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Tesla investors Ross Gerber and Kristin Hull.
Though Musk has hired Yaccarino, a former ads executive at NBCUniversal, to quell advertiser relations, the two often looked like they were on different pages. Yaccarino played defense after Musk cosigned the antisemitic post and threatened to sue the Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League in September 2023.