Ian Miles Cheong on skeptics' criticism of new Twitter CEO

Start your free trial

Access exclusive members only RebelNews+ shows, event footage, and documentaries

Subscribe

This is just an excerpt from The Ezra Levant Show. To see new, ad-free episodes, which air Monday - Friday @ 8 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. MT, become a subscriber to RebelNews+. This episode originally aired on May 17, 2023.

On last night’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra was joined by Ian Miles Cheong, writer for Rebel News and Twitter superuser, to hear his take on the latest with Elon Musk and Twitter.

Ezra asked Ian for his thoughts on the new CEO that Musk hired named Linda Yacano, who has been speculated to be a proponent of online censorship, which prompted Musk to buy Twitter in the first place.

So my take on it is, well, first of all, don't worry, right? Because she may be CEO but her job title doesn't matter because, at the end of the day, his job title is 'owner'. And so the reason he hired her is because of her wealth of experience in the advertising industry. She was responsible for building NBC's Peacock online streaming service where she got a bunch of advertisers for them. So clearly she knows the people who can monetize Twitter and bear in mind, Twitter cannot survive without advertisers as much as you know, as nice as a deal as it would be for Twitter to simply survive on its own. It can't. We live in a world in which Twitter needs money to survive and advertising is the only way to do it.

Ezra agreed and spoke about some signs of her contrarianism.

She actually served on a Donald Trump council… yeah, the fitness council…and, you know, that may not be politically spicy, but doing anything in association with Donald Trump when he was president was a black mark against a liberal, especially in California. So, if she were to have done that, I think that shows some independence of mind and some nonpartisanship. 

Ian spoke on more ways the new CEO seems to carry independent thought.

More importantly, she follows me on Twitter and she follows Libs of Tiktok, she follows Jack Posobiec. I mean, these are accounts that by all, you know, well, by the left's measure would be considered far right. Now, granted, we're not far right. But the fact that she's willing to step out of the boundaries that they've locked her in, she is a member of the establishment after all, shows that she's willing to leave her echo chamber. And that makes her very interesting as a person. I mean, how often do you see an establishment figure even speaking to a member of the Conservatives?

He concluded:

So I think that you know, people are fine to criticize her and they're fine to be apprehensive of her, but I would say give her a chance. And obviously, if things don't work out, then Elon can always fire her. So there's always that. It's not like she owns the company.