Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, put out a poll of Twitter asking if he should step down as the head of the microblogging site in the early hours of Monday, December 19. As the poll closed, 57.5% of the users voted in favour of him stepping down while 42.5% voted ‘no’. In a poll to his 122 million followers, Musk tweeted on Sunday: "Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll". In another tweet, Musk added, “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, as you might get it.” A total of 17.5 million people voted in the poll.
The poll came after the billionaire received backlash over Twitter’s controversial and widely criticised policy change which aimed at preventing users from sharing links from other social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post, among others. Though the policy was rolled back, Twitter had already blocked users from sharing some links to Mastodon, the platform many Twitter users moved to after Musk's takeover.
A series of decisions by Twitter has generated blowback, including the suspension last week of more than half a dozen journalists who report on Musk. The billionaire fired several top executives, including its Indian-American CEO Parag Agrawal, and laid off about half of Twitter’s staff after he took over as head of the social media platform in October. He then gave an ultimatum to the remaining staff that they need to do “extremely hardcore” work or leave, resulting in another thousand or so employees quitting the company.
Musk has started, stopped and restarted a revised verification system that costs $8 for a blue check mark. The billionaire's approach to content moderation has also been criticised, with some civil liberties groups accusing him of taking steps that will increase hate speech and misinformation.
On Friday, December 16, he reinstated a number of journalists he had suspended for allegedly sharing location data about him after the EU and UN called it an attack on press freedom. Reporters for the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post were among those locked out of their accounts.
(With PTI inputs)