Elon Musk Leaves His Future With Twitter Up To Haters & Fans!

Elon Musk is taking a huge chance on people who either love him or hate him.

The South African-native has asked everyone with a Twitter account whether or not he should “step down as the head of Twitter.”

On Sunday, December 18th, the multi-billionaire tweeted out, “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.”

The poll results showed that nearly 60% of people said ‘Yes’ to him stepping down as the head of Twitter.

42.5% of people said he should NOT step down.

And of course, many had hilarious thoughts on Musk’s poll.

Keith Edwards asked, “Did you really just…”

Another retweeted his post with some ClipArt.

“Nope. NO! FU ELON,” they tweeted.

Another joked, “I’m an engineer at Twitter and Elon just asked me to ban all of the accounts that voted Yes on this poll.”

Others poked fun at Musk tweeting, “Stop the count” when the ‘Yes’ poll was at 100% and the ‘No’ poll was at zero.

The Blast previously reported on Twitter’s “Trust & Safety” shrinking.

Clearly, Musk isn’t having a great effect on the social media platform.

The social media platform has faced a staggering number of changes since Musk’s acquisition of the app. The ‘Musk era’ of Twitter has been a year-long process, which was finalized in late October when the $44 billion deal was finally closed.

Musk, 51, has made multiple changes to Twitter’s staff during the last month and a half. He fired the company’s Chief Executive, Chief Financial Officer and the Head of Legal Policy upon his official takeover on October 28th. Prior to Musk’s takeover, a ‘stack ranking review’ began taking place; According to Insider per The Blast’s November 3rd report, “Vice Presidents had been compiling lists of workers in their departments and making two lists: one of workers they want to keep, and another list of workers they want to layoff.

Musk planned to fire half of Twitter’s workforce, cutting 3, 700 employees from the company.

Those layoffs took place on November 4th. Those employees were informed of their termination via email, according to ABC News.

The email read “This is your last day working at the company” and contained the subject line, “Your Role At Twitter.”

Weeks after Musk’s mandated employee layoffs, three founding members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council decided to step away from the company.

According to Huffington Post, Anne Collier, Eirliani Abdul Rahman and Lesley Podesta have resigned from Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, with Collier and Abdul Rahman announcing the move in an open letter.

Collier tweeted a screenshot of the letter, which reads in part, “It is clear from research evidence that, contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and well-being of Twitter users is on the decline. The question has been on our minds: Should Musk be allowed to define digital safety as he has freedom of expression? Our answer is a categorical ‘no.'” (via Net Family News)

The letter also cites research from the Anti-Defamation League and The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which, according to Huffington Post, “shows slurs against Black Americans and gay men have spiked on the platform by 195% and 58% respectively.”

The outlet also reported that the research shows slurs against Black Americans have tripled since Musk’s takeover. Prior to October 28th, those slurs appeared on the platform an average of 1,282 times a day. Now Twitter sees about 3,876. Gay men received an average of 2,506 slurs on the platform per day before Musk took over. Now Twitter sees an average of 3,964 slurs per day.

“I can no longer find a reason to stay in tacit support of what Twitter has become,” Collier also said.

Musk has allowed a number of previously banned users to return to the platform over the last few weeks. He allowed Kanye ‘Ye’ West to be reinstated on Twitter after the rapper had previously posted anti-Semitic content in October, only to boot him off of the platform once again.

Andrew Anglin also reappeared on the platform after his account had been suspended back in 2015, according to Tech Crunch. Anglin is the founder of a neo-Nazi website; Huffington Post also reported Anglin “promised in a statement to abide by all of Twitter’s rules in a statement.”