This past Tuesday, Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, stated that he is going to be officially stepping down from his current position with the company.
This announcement from Musk was made in the wake of his conducting a poll near the start of the week asking Twitter users if he should “step down as head of Twitter.”
“I will abide by the results of this poll,” explained Musk at that time.
The poll, which was held over the course of 12 hours, pulled in 17.5 million votes, with 57.5% stating “yes” that Musk should move to step down while 42.5% issued a vote of “no.”
Musk issued an update on the subject late Tuesday evening, explaining that he will step down once he finds someone else with the skills needed to run his new company and that he will then focus on the hardware and software part of the company.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” he stated on the platform. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2022
This vote held by Musk comes after he dealt with extreme criticism from his visit to the World Cup this past Sunday after the company released a statement claiming that it was going to kick users off the platform if they choose to promote their other social media accounts using their Twitter accounts.
“Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes,” explained Musk in a post. “My apologies. Won’t happen again.”
This new policy was highlighted in a blog post that the company released on the platform in the middle of the World Cup, a red flag that seemed to indicate that such news would not be taken well and would need to be buried underneath other news.
“We recognize 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,” the company explained in a release. “Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.”
The company stated that it would “remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) … or providing your handle without a URL” to the previously mentioned platforms or to “3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio.”
“Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy,” the statement expressed. “This includes, but is not limited to, spelling out ‘dot’ for social media platforms that use ‘.’ in the names to avoid URL creation, or sharing screenshots of your handle on a prohibited social media platform.”
The statement expressed that cross-posting content across many platforms was not actually a policy violation, including from the group of sites listed earlier. The company stated that it would let people pay a fee to allow the user to promote their social media accounts on other platforms.
