The owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, continues to accumulate escapades, so much so that the billionaire handed over his position as boss in the hands of his users on Sunday evening.
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“Should I step down as Twitter boss? I will comply with the results of the survey, ”he wrote on his platform Sunday evening.
And already a little after 7 p.m., 3.2 million people had already voted.
“Be careful with what you wish for,” added the main interested party in a tweet.
The poll comes hours after a new controversy rocked the social media outlet it bought for US$44 billion earlier this year.
“Twitter no longer allows free promotion of certain social networks on Twitter,” a statement said.
Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr are targeted, along with “links to social media aggregators like linktr.ee, lnk.bio”.
Users who violate this policy risk having their account suspended.
“It’s incomprehensible to see why he does that, because it’s out of the logic of social networks which are there precisely to network and allow people to share information”, points out Bruno Guglielminetti, host of the digital news podcast My notebook.
“Occasionally sharing links is fine, but no more free competitor ads, which is absurd in the extreme,” Elon Musk said in a tweet late in the evening.
It should be noted that the biography and the name of the user cannot contain a link either, under penalty of temporary or even permanent suspension.
This policy was quick to react on the Web, especially since Musk has repeatedly acted as a great defender of freedom of expression.
“What will be next? raises Bruno Guglielminetti. We are [censé jouir de] free speech, but he’s telling people, ‘You’re not allowed to share links to content that exists elsewhere anymore.
One more suspension
This umpteenth controversy comes after two other journalists from the Washington Post joined the list of media representatives this weekend who had their accounts suspended, if only temporarily, by Twitter.
The ax fell after they repeatedly tried to reach Elon Musk to get a reaction from him for a report they were working on.
“It’s the reign of arbitrariness, it’s unpredictable, it’s not clear,” worries Jean-Hugues Roy, professor at the School of Media at the University of Quebec in Montreal. [Musk] is closing Twitter in on itself.”
tumble
By chaining controversial decisions, the popularity of his social media could quickly plummet and even affect the businessman’s other businesses, according to Mr. Roy.
“Right now he’s shooting his Twitter shoe, but will he shoot his Tesla shoe?” suggests the expert.
-With AFP