Twitter CEO Musk launched a poll on the social media platform on Sunday asking whether he should step down as the company’s leader, adding that he would follow the results of the poll. The poll is due to close at around 1120 GMT on Monday, although the billionaire did not give details on when he would step down, if he had to, according to the poll results. In a reply to a Twitter user later, Musk said, “There is no successor” regarding a possible CEO change.
Musk told a Delaware court last month that he would reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find a new leader to run the company. The survey comes after Twitter updated its policies on Sunday, which banned accounts created solely to promote other social media companies and content that contains links or usernames for competing platforms.
Minutes before the vote, Musk apologized, tweeting: “Major policy changes will be voted on going forward. The policy update will affect content from social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram Meta Platforms, along with Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post, while also allowing content to be published across content, Twitter support said in a tweet. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who recently invested in social media platform Nostr, responded to Twitter’s support post with one word: “Why?”. In response to another user’s post about banning Nostr promotion, Dorsey said, “It doesn’t make sense.”
Short video platform TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd, was not included in the list. Last week, Twitter disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, a volunteer group created in 2016 to advise the social media platform on decisions about the site. The policy change follows other chaotic actions on Twitter since the social network was bought by Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla. He fired top management and laid off about half of his staff while he saw how much to charge for Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.
Musk also suspended the accounts of several journalists due to the controversy over the publication of public information about the billionaire. Musk reinstated the accounts on Friday after criticism from government officials, interest groups and journalism organizations from several parts of the world, with some saying the microblogging platform threatens press freedom.