The owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, continues to accumulate escapades, to such an extent 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 want,” added the main interested party in particular 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 “My Notebook” digital news podcast.
“Occasional sharing of links is fine, but no more free advertising from competitors, which is absurd in the extreme,” Elon Musk tweeted in the evening.
Note that the user’s biography and name 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 [supposé 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 Washington Post journalists this weekend joined the list of media representatives who had their accounts suspended, if only temporarily, by Twitter.
The ax would have fallen after trying to reach Elon Musk multiple times 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.
“For the moment, he is shooting in his Twitter shoe, but will he shoot in his Tesla shoe?”, suggests the expert.
-With AFP