On the 19th day of December 2022, Elon Musk threw a question at his audience whereby he asked them if he should step down from his current position as the head of Twitter. He assured the audience that he would abide by the results of the poll on his official Twitter handle.
The poll received a tremendous response with over 14,700,559 votes within the first half an hour. With 57.1 per cent of the users clicking ‘No’, it can be concluded that the majority of people who cast their votes do not want him to continue with the role that he assumed.
The poll was followed by another tweet that read, “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it”.
Elon Musk’s Twitter
On 14th April 2022, Musk offered to purchase the micro-blogging site, and after a series of disagreements between Musk and the Twitter board, the deal was finally sealed on the 27th of October 2022.
Ever since Elon Musk got involved with Twitter, he made several path-breaking decisions that were not gracefully accepted by the majority of the public. This started when the company decided to fire more than half of what constituted its employee count. Parag Agarwal, the former CEO of Twitter, was also fired during the mass expulsions by the company.
The new decision-making body of Twitter also put a price tag on the ‘blue ticks’. Verification of genuine accounts was priced at 8 dollars per month.
The dilemma of Banning and Un-banning
Elon Musk also brought back many Twitter accounts that were earlier banned from the platform. He made the announcement for the same after conducting a similar kind of poll where he asked if he should offer another chance to accounts that have not broken any law or engaged in egregious spam. Musk always had his stand clear about his disagreement with Twitter’s policy to ban accounts permanently.
However, in recent events, the accounts of some journalists were banned from Twitter. Guterres’ spokesperson Stephane Dujarric expressed her displeasure over this arbitrary banning of accounts. The suspended accounts belonged to journalists working for reputed news agencies like the Washington Post, The New York Times, and alike. For the un-suspension of some of these accounts, the head of Twitter again conducted a poll which he later dismissed citing ‘too many options’ as the reason.
In response to these bans, many referred to Elon’s decision as ‘hypocritical’ in nature.
Intolerance for rival sites
Elon and his team decided to stop sharing links of other social media platforms on Twitter to avoid ‘free promotions’. In a statement by Twitter, it was explained that even though they understand that their users are active on other sites, they will however not allow any free promotions on their site, and accounts of those who do not abide by the rules can be suspended. With Mastodon in a race to replace Twitter, the head of the company seems to be annoyed with these new competitors.
