Elon Musk has asked Twitter users to decide if he should step down as head of the social media platform. He launched a poll yesterday and said he would abide by the result.
According to The Guardian:
Musk assumed the role of CEO at the end of October after firing a host of senior executives and dissolving its board of directors. Within minutes of posting the poll, more than one million people had voted.
After 20 minutes of polling, when the yes vote gained a double-digit lead, Musk responded to a suggestion that he had already picked a new CEO, saying: “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”
He also walked back the site’s latest policy controversy, after Twitter announced that it would remove accounts that offered “free promotion of certain social media platforms”.
Musk said the policy would be adjusted to affect only accounts whose “primary purpose is promotion of competitors, which essentially falls under the no spam rule”.
The platform earlier said the move would affect content from numerous social media websites, including Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post, but would allow cross-content posting.
However, video platform TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, was not included in the list.
The announcement came on Sunday – the same day that Musk tweeted photos from the Lusail Stadium in Qatar, where he watched Argentina beat France on penalties to win the men’s football World Cup.
Musk attended the game alongside Jared Kushner, a former US presidential adviser and Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Trump’s Truth Social was among the platforms named in the Twitter linking ban.
On the initial policy change, the Twitter Support account said: “We recognise that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.”
It gave examples of content that would be removed including “follow me @username on Instagram” and “check out my profile on Facebook – facebook.com/username”…
Last week, Twitter disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, a volunteer group formed in 2016 to advise the social media platform on site decisions.
The policy change follows other contentious decisions at Twitter since Musk bought the social network in October, including sacking senior management and laying off about half of its workforce. A number of major advertisers left the platform over concerns about its direction.
Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2022
