Elon Musk bought Twitter, then brought back right-wing accounts that had been banned. This week he suspended journalists. He seems to be paying his respects to QAnon. And he’s just asked Twitter users to vote on whether he should step down as the head of Twitter.
“I will abide by the results of this poll.”
I’ve seen theories on Twitter that Musk has already picked his successor. That this is his face-saving way of making it look like he’s bowed to popular opinion. The truth is he’s losing money hand-over-fist since he took over the company. The New York Times reported ad revenue was now 80% lower than Twitter expected, and is predicting it’ll bring in hundreds of millions of dollars less just in the last 13 weeks of 2022.
But this is our chance to weigh in. If social media is going to impact our democracy, at least this is one way we can try to make our voices be heard. It also points out how sadly undemocratic social media really is. (Musk is dictator-for-life at Twitter for as long as he wants to be, and these pretend votes on Twitter have zero legal weight.) For all we know, he’s just trolling all those people who hate him.
But now major news outlets like Reuters are now watching this poll’s results. So if the Daily Kos community rises up and expresses a collective disapproval — the world will notice.