A majority of participants in a poll launched by Elon Musk on Twitter voted Monday for the entrepreneur to abandon the direction of the social network.
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Of more than 17 million voters, 57.5% are in favor of the departure of Mr. Musk, who had pledged to respect the result, but who did not immediately react.
“Should I leave the management of Twitter?” Asked the billionaire overnight from Sunday to Monday on the social network.
“I will stick to the results of this poll,” he promised.
In an exchange with one of his Twitter followers, Mr. Musk assured that he had no designated successor. He said in another post that the platform was “on the fast track to bankruptcy.”
Since his takeover of the platform at the end of October, the boss of Tesla and SpaceX has caused many controversies by laying off half of Twitter’s workforce, reinstating suspended accounts, suspending those of journalists and seeking to launch a new paid subscription. .
“From the botched subscription plan to the banning of journalists to the daily political controversies, it’s been an all-out storm as advertisers fled, leaving Twitter to widen its deficit,” noted Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. Securities, which estimates the company’s potential losses at $4 billion a year.
The poll launched by Mr. Musk came after a new decision by the social network that caused a lot of reaction.
Twitter announced on Sunday that it would no longer be possible to post links to competing networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon or Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social network.
It is now prohibited to tweet a message like: “Thank you for following me @ID on Instagram”, indicated the platform.
These new rules have aroused the misunderstanding of many users, including Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former boss of Twitter.
After some accounts were suspended under the new rule, including that of investor Paul Graham, Mr. Musk qualified his decision.
He first tweeted that instead of targeting individual tweets, the policy would be limited to “suspending accounts only when that account’s ‘primary’ purpose is promoting competitors.”
The stormy billionaire then claimed that “major political changes” on the social network would systematically be subject to a vote.
Last week, Mr. Musk deleted and then restored the accounts of several American journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post in particular, causing the European Union and the UN to react. The Vice-President of the European Commission even threatened the entrepreneur with sanctions.
The multi-billionaire first suspended @elonjet on Wednesday, an account that automatically reported his private jet trips, then the accounts of journalists who had tweeted about the decision, accusing them of putting his family at risk.
Photo d’archives, AFP
These were reinstated on Saturday, but some said they were told to delete certain posts if they wanted to make full use of the platform.
On Saturday evening, the Twitter account of a Washington Post journalist, Taylor Lorenz, was in turn suspended for several hours.
“Elon Musk has suspended my Twitter account,” said the journalist, who covers the technology sector for the Washington Post, on her blog.
His account was restored on Sunday.
Since taking over the reins of Twitter, Mr. Musk has reinstated many accounts that had been banned, including Mr. Trump’s. He also put an end to the fight against misinformation linked to Covid-19.
On the other hand, he suspended the account of rapper Kanye West after the publication of several messages deemed anti-Semitic and refused the return to the platform of far-right conspirator Alex Jones.