CTA President Kinsey Fabrizio introduced X Corp. CEO Linda Yaccarino and journalist Catherine Herridge for a CES keynote conversation on the social media company established by Elon Musk in 2023. Herridge skipped the pleasantries and went straight to the news that Meta was abandoning third-party fact checking, and replacing it with Community Notes, adopting X’s policy on the topic. “Mark [Zuckerberg], Meta, welcome to the party,” said Yaccarino. “How exciting when you think Community Notes are good for the world. It couldn’t be more validating that Mark and Meta realize this.”

She continued that, “collective consciousness is keeping us honest.” “Community Notes is the fastest, most accurate and most effective fact-checking without bias,” she added. “This is a genuine embrace of free speech.”

In answer to a question about whether X was experiencing growth in users, Yaccarino responded that, “90 percent of the advertisers are back” and the platform’s growth is being fueled by Gen Z users. “There is no surrogate for X,” she said, a phrase she repeated several times during the conversation.

In addition to presenting Community Notes as a safety feature on the platform, Yaccarino also revealed that the company has rolled out over 250 product innovations that didn’t exist prior to acquisition. “These are tools that marketers care about with controls and settings that let you engage as you wish,” she said.

She highlighted Trend Genius, which has been in beta for the last four or five months. According to X, “Trend Genius allows advertisers to hand select the conversation topics they want to align with … [and] when conversation about these topics organically reaches a heightened level or velocity on X, an ad featuring preprogrammed creative is automatically deployed on the platform.”

“You get global scale to the conversation with maximum efficiency,” said Yaccarino, who noted that another X achievement this last year was the roll-out of an NFL portal, which has gotten 36 billion impressions and 4 billion video views.

Herridge asked if X was planning on opening a news portal. Yaccarino equivocated, but did note that, “the future of news isn’t legacy media” and that X just hired former Wall Street Journal editor and bureau chief John Stoll.

Herridge followed up with a question on “how this will work” when Musk is co-heading President Trump’s proposed Bureau of Government Efficiency. “There is no better person to set a vision and inspire others,” said Yaccarino.