• by Colin Kirkland , April 3, 2024

As X owner Elon Musk battles Media Matters over a brand-safety report that led to major advertisers leaving the platform, the social media company has announced two new hires to its Safety team.

Long-time Twitter/X employee Kylie McRoberts will take on the role of X’s Head of Safety, while Yale Cohen, a former Publicis Media executive and contributor to MediaPost, will become X’s new Head of Brand Safety and Advertiser Solutions.

“Kylie will oversee the global Safety team, which is responsible for developing new products, tools, and features to protect our platform and community, maintaining our Safety policies, and enhancing our enforcement methodology and operations,” the social media company wrote in a post on its platform.

McRoberts, who worked in privacy and cybersecurity roles at Google and has spent almost four years at X, will also take on the responsibility of helping build out a new safety hub in Austin, Texas, that X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced in January.

Under Musk’s leadership, X's previous Heads of Trust and Safety (Musk recently cut “Trust” from the job title, calling “trust” a “euphemism for censorship”) have not fared well.

McRoberts is taking on the role nine months after X’s previous Trust and Safety chief Ella Irwin resigned due to a disagreement she had with Musk over a controversial documentary called “What is a Woman” that aired on the platform.

After resigning, Irwin stated publicly that working for Musk had been “the hardest experience that I’ve gone through in my career.”

Prior to Irwin, Yoel Roth held the position of head of Trust and Safety at X but resigned weeks after Musk took over the app and then faced a barrage of pointed public attacks from the new X owner and his followers.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see whether McRoberts is able to work with Musk’s erratic decision-making behavior, crumbling Safety team (after his Twitter takeover, Musk fired 80% of the team's engineers and dissolved the company's Trust and Safety Council), and “freedom of speech, not reach” content moderation approach, which has led to the loss of major advertisers and ongoing lawsuits.

McRoberts will have the help of Yale Cohen, who is joining the X's Safety team after serving as executive vice president of global digital standards at marketing firm Publicis Media.

Cohen will be responsible for facilitating a safe environment for brands on X, which is still in disarray after losing the business of major brands because of a rise in antisemitic content and hate speech on the platform.

In January, Yaccarino told a Senate committee that X had around 2,300 people working on trust and safety and content moderation, but it is still unclear how many of these employees are full-time.