Elon Musk polls Twitter users about whether he should step down

Elon Musk is asking users to decide if he should stay in charge of Twitter after acknowledging that he made a mistake Sunday in launching speech restrictions that banned mentions of rival social media platforms.

In yet another drastic policy change, Twitter announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited.”

But the move generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Musk, that he promised not to make additional major policy changes without an online survey of users.

“My apologies. Won’t happen again,” Musk tweeted, before launching a 12-hour poll asking if he should step down. “I will abide by the results of this poll.”

The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.

The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and Donald Trump’s Truth Social. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok and LinkedIn.

Twitter had said it would at least temporarily suspend accounts that include the banned websites in their profile — a practice so widespread it would have been difficult to enforce the restrictions on the platform’s millions of users around the world. Not only links but attempts to bypass the ban by spelling out “instagram dot com” could have led to a suspension, the company said.

A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who has praised Musk in the past but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored, as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.

Musk said Twitter will suspend some accounts according to the policy, but “only when that account’s *primary* purpose is promotion of competitors.”

Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after it tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. Mastodon has grown rapidly in recent weeks as an alternative for Twitter users who are unhappy with Musk’s overhaul since he bought the company for $44 billion in late October and began restoring accounts that ran afoul of the previous leadership’s rules against hateful conduct.

Musk permanently banned the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, then changed Twitter’s rules to prohibit the sharing of another person’s location without their consent. He then took aim at journalists who were writing about the jet-tracking account, which can still be found on other social media sites, alleging that they were broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates.”

He used that to justify Twitter’s moves last week to suspend the accounts of numerous journalists who cover the platform, including reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications. Many of those accounts were restored following an online poll by Musk.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said she was suspended after posting a message on Twitter tagging Musk and requesting an interview.

Sally Buzbee, the Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.

“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation — this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story,” Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.

Musk’s promise to let users decide his future at Twitter through an unscientific survey appeared to come out of nowhere Sunday, though he had promised in November that a reorganization was happening soon.

Musk was questioned in court Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. He had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to his potentially $55-billion compensation plan as chief executive of the electric car company.

Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla and didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer. He also said he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It has been more than a month since he said that.

In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.