Elon Musk conducted a poll asking Twitter users whether he should continue running the platform as the chief or not. To his surprise, the poll didn’t end in his favor as a lot of users expressed their words below the poll. 57 percent of users believe that Musk shouldn’t be in charge of running things at Twitter.
Musk also mentioned while conducting the poll that he would abide by the audience’s mandate. It means that he would act upon the poll results whether it results in his favor or not. Musk responded in a Twitter thread that he would step down as soon as he finds a replacement.
Why do Twitter users want Musk to step down?
Ever since Musk took control, the platform has become increasingly unpleasant for users. Every few days there is a policy change or a feature roll-out that wrecks the trust in the platform. Musk wants to make Twitter a cash machine as soon as possible. But he is willing to do so by compromising the core values of the platform.
Users expected Musk to be benevolent and hear them out but the recent policy changes suggest otherwise. Twitter now blocks you from posting Facebook and links to other social sites. They even published the new policy changes citing the reason for blocking the platform but later took down the webpage. After that, the Twitter Safety account, “Should we have a policy preventing the creation of or use of existing accounts for the main purpose of advertising other social media platforms?”
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
Twitter is trying to shove even the most basic features of a social media platform like link sharing behind a paywall. We understand that as the new owner, Musk needs to extract profits but cracking down on posting Linktree and other social account links in tweets and bio aren’t the sane thing to do. Mastodon gained a lot of users during the last few weeks but Twitter now blocks Mastodon links as well.
Image: Pexels / Brett Jordan
Maybe Musk doesn’t realize that in the end Twitter is just a platform and isn’t as big as other competitors in the social media space. If he continues to make such brash decisions, then the audience feels better if he isn’t running things.