Good thing I quoted from that Twitter policy yesterday, because it’s already been rolled back.
And of course, Musk didn’t take the internet yelling at him at all well, so he also created a poll asking whether he should step down as CEO of Twitter.
He may have thought his position was safe because so many people who disagree with him have deactivated their Twitter accounts and so could not vote, BUT:
He didn’t consider that shareholders in his other companies may want him to stop making himself into the main character on Twitter every day and thereby tanking the value of their stock.
He also didn’t consider that he’s lost his luster for a lot of previous fanboys, and when the tide turns from unquestioning adulation to what-the-heck-was-I-thinking, it turns hard.
He may be forced to accept that he is not the memey edgelord he thinks he is, and cannot really aspire to be anything more than a reply-guy with an inflated follower count.
Usually, when Musk does polls the results are a foregone conclusion. Since more people voted for him to step down (57.5%) than to stay (42.5%) and there were over 17 million votes cast, it’s hard to figure that he already knew this would happen. He said he’d abide by the results, but not how quickly he would. In fact he still (as I type) hasn’t said anything about the results at all. Will this poll be quietly deleted? Has he already quit and just not told anyone (because he fired all the people you’d normally tell)? Will we now have to cope with a breathless media cycle of “Who will he pick to run Twitter?” like being forced to watch a series of Succession written by CHAT GPT and starring Elon, Elon, and maybe (in a cameo) Elon’s mom?
Realistically, this (not the poll, the question of stepping down) was bound to happen. He bought a social media company with no understanding of the global laws around social media, privacy, and hate speech. He had a weird focus on “free speech in America” which ignored the fact that Twitter is a global platform.
He went from “free speech for everyone!” to “free speech only for people I agree with!” in record time, gave extremists back their MAGA-phones, and banned anyone who he felt may once have side-eyed him.
Over the course of his ownership, Mastodon account sign-ups have increased exponentially, and active daily users have skyrocketed. You might see an 8 million number bandied about for Mastodon, but it’s not likely that those are all unique accounts (many people have multiple accounts so they can be part of multiple affinity groups, each with their own local timelines). It’s a more accurate measure to look at the number of daily active users, and the amount of times those users posted.
In the past week, Mastodon broke all its previous records for posts in a 24 hour period, breaking the half a billion barrier for the first time.
Whichever way you slice the data, the daily active user count has gone from below 400k to around 2.5 million. That’s a lot of people in a few short weeks. That, and the increased helpfulness of mainstream media in offering guides to joining Mastodon (like this one, from the Washington Post) probably made Musk a bit sweaty.
IDK, Elon, you ban enough journalists and they might actively help people move off your platform, whoda thunk?
Anyway, all of this gives me hope that soon we won’t have to think about or listen to Elon Musk and his fanboys anymore.
As for Twitter, welp, it’s a big ship to turn around, and it’s already leaking dangerously so I wish its new captain all the best (whoever they may be), but I have no intention of going back there.