Musk Restricts Policy Poll Voting To Paid Twitter Blue Users

Twitter owner Elon Musk has said only paying Twitter Blue subscribers will be allowed to vote in future polls, after users voted for him to step down as chief executive of the social network.

On Sunday Musk launched a poll asking whether he should step down as chief of the company, saying he would “abide” by the result. By Monday, when the poll ended, 57.5 percent of the 17.5 million users who had voted said he should leave.

Following the results Musk’s account on the service was uncharacteristically silent for several hours but he broke his absence to reply “interesting” to several posts suggesting the poll had been skewed by bots.

Responding to another suggestion that “Blue subscribers should be the only ones that can vote in policy related polls”, Musk wrote, “Good point. Twitter will make that change.”

Poll decisions

He has not provided any further details about a plan to step down as chief of the firm or who a successor might be.

An industry analyst said Musk may have already made the decision to stop running Twitter himself as the share price of his “golden child” Tesla, which accounts for more than 90 percent of his wealth, continues to plunge.

“The Musk CEO poll is a sign that the noise is growing louder and louder given the spider web of Twitter and Tesla weakness,” wrote analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities.

Musk has used Twitter polls to attract attention to his decision-making for other major moves, such as selling a tenth of his Tesla holdings in 2021 or restoring Donald Trump’s Twitter account earlier this month.

Controversy

In many cases he appeared to have already made the decision before holding the poll.

In this case, Musk told a Delaware judge on 16 November that he planned to reduce his time at Twitter and “find somebody else to run Twitter over time”.

Musk has been criticised for his erratic moves at Twitter since taking over the firm in October, including firing its executive team and half of its employees.

Last week he suspended an account that tracks his private jet and then banned the Twitter account of competitor Mastodon for posting a link to the Mastodon version of the jet-tracking account.

Musk also suspended the accounts of a number of journalists who had covered the jet-tracking issue and said links to all other competing social media networks would be disallowed, but stepped back on both moves.