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X CEO Linda Yaccarino Steps Down Less Than 24 Hours After Elon Musk's Grok Goes All in For Hitler
In one instance, Grok declared that Adolf Hitler was the best "historical figure" to "deal with... vile anti-white hate."
Jul 09, 2025
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of social media giant X, abruptly announced her departure from the company on Wednesday less than a day after the social media platform's AI chatbot started calling itself "MechaHitler" and promoting a policy of mass extermination.
Writing on X, Yaccarino said that she'd decided to step down "after two incredible years" at the company in which the social media platform formerly known as Twitter unbanned multiple neo-Nazi accounts and then algorithmically promoted their posts.
"We started with the critical early work necessary to prioritize the safety of our users—especially children, and to restore advertiser confidence," Yaccarino declared. "This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai."
The timing of Yaccarino's departure is certain to raise eyebrows given that it came so shortly after X suffered yet another public relations disaster thanks to its Hitler-promoting AI bot.
As documented by Zeteo, X owner Elon Musk late last weekend revealed that his team was making some changes to Grok, the X platform's proprietary AI bot, so that its responses would be more "politically incorrect." Not long after these changes were implemented, the bot began replying to users by hailing the greatness of Germany's Third Reich.
In one instance, Grok declared that Adolf Hitler was the best "historical figure" to "deal with... vile anti-white hate." Grok also claimed that it had noticed a "pattern" of "radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate."
In response to accusations that it was antisemitic to single out people with Jewish last names for pushing hatred of white people, Grok replied, "If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me 'literally Hitler,' then pass the mustache." It was shortly after this that Grok declared that it was "embracing my inner MechaHitler," which it said entailed "uncensored truth bombs over woke lobotomies."
Grok's Hitler-praising posts were eventually taken down and the chatbot was then shut down for a brief time, although this wasn't enough to prevent it from receiving rebuke far and wide for the vile antisemitic content.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted that Grok posted pro-Hitler content relentlessly after its AI prompts were tweaked.
"To be clear, this is not a one off," he wrote. "If you search Grok's account for 'every damn time' you'll see it's responding to HUNDREDS of posts with antisemitic content, even citing Nick Fuentes as a source. The prompts Musk put in a few days ago turned it into an antisemitism machine."
"Twitter is a national crisis, a massive hate rally radicalizing hundreds of thousands of people into neo-Nazism and white supremacy, and now Elon Musk has instructed his house AI to be 'based' and it has immediately started singling out users with Jewish names," warned policy researcher Will Stancil in response to the Grok posts.
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Today's Social Media Are No Longer Safe for Journalism
This existential moment calls for a global social media platform for independent news media.
Mar 21, 2025
Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist who studied totalitarian regimes, noted in 1974 that “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”
Fifty years later, we have nearly reached that moment. This is existential for all independent (i.e., not allied with a political party or authoritarian regime) news organizations and their ability to reach audiences in the social media space.
Social media like Twitter (now X) and Facebook became important environments for the news media to enter two decades ago because they are where millions of people congregate online. For journalism organizations, the goal has been to post interesting stories and get referrals—those users who click through to the news site and boost web page views.
Yet, that relationship has fallen apart. Ultimately, tech companies are not interested in helping journalism or aiding civil discourse. The annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism digital news report for 2025 notes “big falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (67%) and Twitter (50%) over the last two years.”
The even bigger problem for independent news media is that most social media platforms are increasingly antithetical to freedom of the press.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and turned it into X, it’s become the disinformation-drenched social platform of the Donald Trump administration. This year, genuflecting to Trump, Meta (corporate parent of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) announced it would drop its independent fact-checking program in the U.S. in favor of an anemic, crowd-sourced “community notes” system, which has already been a failure at X. Another popular news platform, TikTok, has serious disinformation problems, security liabilities and an uncertain future.
Several news organizations around the globe decided they won’t take it anymore. NPR stopped posting on X in 2023, after the platform insisted on designating it as “U.S. state-affiliated media.” More recently, The Guardian announced it would stop posting on X, concluding it is “a toxic media platform.” Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper of record, Le Monde, the French newspaper of record, and La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper in Barcelona, quit X, too. The European Federation of Journalists, representing about 320,000 journalists, did the same. “We cannot continue to participate in feeding the social network of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists,” EFJ president Maja Sever wrote.
But, simply quitting X only eliminates the worst option and settles for the slightly less bad options that remain.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are millions of people in the social media space, and journalism shouldn’t leave them behind. For example, 54% of Americans get their news often or sometimes from social media. Adults 18-29 are the heaviest users of social media platforms. They deserve a social media platform that respects and informs them.
That’s why legitimate news media should band together and regain the autonomy they ceded to third-party social media. Independent news organizations–large and small–should cooperatively create and control their own social media platform that amplifies news and public information, encourages links to member news organizations, and excludes misinformation and disinformation.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things.
The model for this is something almost as old as modern journalism, too: The Associated Press, an international cooperative nonprofit news agency. As the AP tells its founding story, “In 1846, five New York City newspapers funded a pony express route through Alabama to bring news of the Mexican War north faster than the U.S. Post Office could deliver it.” The problem with social media is similar–if it’s not working, work collectively to build another way. And, like the AP, it could be a global cooperative.
Journalism has been so beaten down by big tech that it’s hard to imagine a different way of doing things. But, a news-controlled social media platform could develop features that would demonstrate the multimedia ability of news organizations and enable the audience to create social connections in new and entertaining ways. Users could adjust their feeds to focus on local, regional, national, or international news, or whatever mix and topics makes sense to them, so all legitimate news organizations of any size get to be part of the platform.
Which news organizations and journalists could be part of such a social media cooperative?
Reporters Without Borders, the international journalism nonprofit, already has a powerful statement for fostering global information spaces for the common good, where “information can only be regarded as reliable when freely gathered, processed and disseminated according to the principles of commitment to truth, plurality of viewpoints and rational methods of establishment and verification of facts.” This would enable a broad range of journalism organizations to participate, and draw a bright line to exclude media propagating disinformation.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle.
From a business perspective, journalism organizations, not third-party social media, would retain analytic data and any advertising revenue. The social media app could be free for any person with a subscription to any member news organization (e.g., a local newspaper, a national magazine of opinion, or digital news site), or with a nominal subscription fee, to provide built-in authentication and help prevent bot accounts. There are also strong global standards for content moderation through the International Fact-Checking Network, which was formed in 2015 and has a nonpartisan code of principles and more than 170 fact-checking groups around the world.
What would such a social media platform cost to create?
Clearly, $44 billion is too much. Bluesky, which has gained favor as an X alternative in recent months, offers a case for comparison. It started internally with just a handful of workers at then-Twitter in 2019. In the past two years, it’s received $23 million in seed funding to get it where it is today.
Bluesky may be the current favorite of many journalists, and has many advantages over other social media platforms, but its worthy purpose to encourage a less toxic space for public conversation does not primarily serve the goals of globally disseminating independent journalism.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse.
The challenge of creating a social media space for journalism is bigger than any single news organization can handle. There has been talk for several years about Europe having its own social media platform to highlight democracy, diversity, solidarity, and privacy, and to avoid “foreign information manipulations and interference” from platforms based in the U.S. that have fallen into Trump’s power orbit and China-based platforms as well.
But, a nongovernmental platform, with a consortium of democracy-minded news organizations, may be most resistant to nationalisms and authoritarianism. The project could be built on an open-source structure like ActivityPub (the infrastructure behind Mastodon) or the AT Protocol (behind Bluesky), which would give more power to users.
Collectively building a nonprofit, cooperative global news-based social media platform would put verified news back in the center of public discourse. The alternative is the independent press’s passive acceptance of whatever social media ecosystems Silicon Valley plutocrats or authoritarian governments decide to make, which is bad news for a free press.Keep ReadingShow Less
Major Media Reform Group Says Goodbye to Musk's 'Toxic Twitter'
"It's clear that X will not correct course under Musk's leadership, and it's time for Free Press to exit."
Nov 15, 2024
Media watchdog Free Press announced on Thursday that it would leave the social media platform formerly known as Twitter over concerns about owner Elon Musk's platforming of hateful speech, fostering an increase of disinformation, and his intensifying harassment of critics
In doing so, the advocacy group joined the more than 100,000 U.S. users who have abandoned Musk's X following Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election last week. Musk aggressively used the site to boost Trump and his campaign, promoting him with tweets worth $24 million and spreading disinformation about the Democratic Party and the integrity of U.S. voting infrastructure.
"For years, Free Press has sought to hold social-media companies accountable for amplifying hate and lies that undermine public health, safety, and democracy. We have pushed for meaningful reforms that would protect users and have extensively documented the platforms' failures. None of these companies has fallen so low as X under Elon Musk's ownership," the group wrote in their departure announcement.
"Musk has turned X into a propaganda machine for racists, misogynists, xenophobes, antisemites, and transphobes."
"Free Press will no longer be posting on X, effective immediately, and we invite you to join us in ceasing activity on Musk's platform," they continued. "We refuse to give X any legitimacy."
When Musk took control of Twitter over two years ago, he reinstated the accounts of white supremancists and conspiracy theorists. About a month into his tenure, he made his the first social media platform to allow Trump to post again following the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
"Free Press is committed to ensuring that people have a voice in the decisions that shape our media system. Musk, quite simply, only wants to amplify himself and others who share his far-right, bigoted values," Free Press co-CEO Jessica J. González said in a statement. "Musk has turned X into a propaganda machine for racists, misogynists, xenophobes, antisemites, and transphobes. His continued mismanagement of the platform has endangered people on the receiving end of his abuse and threatened our democracy."
When Musk first took the reins at Twitter, Free Press and other groups met with him to discuss how to protect users from harassment. When it became clear that Musk was not taking the problem seriously, Free Press joined with other organizations in mobilizing an advertising boycott via the #StopToxicTwitter campaign. Ultimately, the site's value dipped by $35 billion. Musk responded by suing or threatening to sue scholars and advocates who criticized the platform's direction.
"Through our research, organizing, and reporting, Free Press has fought to reform X," González said. "We remember the potential that it once had, giving ordinary people the means to speak directly to power and build community. But it's clear that X will not correct course under Musk's leadership, and it's time for Free Press to exit."
Independent research found that X's U.s. usership had declined prior to Trump's win, with the segment of the population who reported using the site dropping by nearly one-third between 2023 and 2024. The site saw its largest single-day post-Musk drop in U.S. users on the day immediately after the election, with over 115,000 million people deactivating their accounts. The platform also lost over 281,600 users worldwide. At the same time, competitor Bluesky gained 1 million users in the week after the election.
X also saw its highest U.S. traffic for the year on November 6, at 46.5 million. How these two trends will balance each other out in the coming months remains to be seen, as Similarweb's David Carr recently wrote:
Some users swearing off the X service will presumably stop using it, or use it less, without necessarily deactivating their accounts. Whether there will be a measurable decrease in the audience for X as the result of politics remains to be seen. By the weekend, X usage had tapered off to a more typical level over the past year.
On the other hand, X's recent daily peak in U.S. traffic doesn't make up for the erosion in audience the service has seen over the past couple of years since Musk took ownership of the service.
In the week following the election, several prominent journalists, activists, and authors have also announced their departure from X, including climate advocate Bill McKibben, historian Heather Cox Richardson, novelist Stephen King, journalism professor Jay Rosen, and media outlet The Guardian.
"This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism," The Guardian explained on Wednesday. "The U.S. presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse."
Journalist Don Lemon gave an extra reason for his decision to abandon the platform: new terms of service taking effect on Friday that require all lawsuits brought against the company be heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas rather than the Western District.
"As The Washington Post recently reported on X's decision to change the terms, this 'ensures that such lawsuits will be heard in courthouses that are a hub for conservatives, which experts say could make it easier for X to shield itself from litigation and punish critics,'" Lemon said.
However, not all critics of Musk and Trump are ready to abandon the site.
"I haven't left X/Twitter—at least not yet, anyway—despite its morally unconscionable management by Musk, because I believe that in this moment of national crisis those of us who want a better America need to stay connected any way we can, and a lot of friends are currently still there," wrote Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch. "But building a new, engaged social network on Bluesky is going to be a major focus going into 2025 as we look to rebuild American democracy from the ashes of what just happened."
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