Twitter owner Elon Musk on Sunday posted a poll to his account regarding his future as the head of the company.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” he wrote, adding in a second tweet he posted later, “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.”
A few minutes before he posted the poll, Musk had tweeted, “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.”
The poll came hours after Twitter announced it would no longer allow users to promote their accounts on a host of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Post and Truth Social, AFP reported.
The move comes after users on Twitter started encouraging their followers to view their posts elsewhere, amid the sea of changes at the social media company.
"Going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms," Twitter said in a statement quoted by AFP.
"At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL," the company explained.
Users would thus be barred, for example, from posting "Follow me @username on Instagram," Twitter said.
First-time violators will face actions "ranging from requiring deletion of one or more Tweets to temporarily locking account(s). Any subsequent offenses will result in permanent suspension," it stressed.
Sunday’s announcement is the latest in a series of controversial moves taken by Musk since he purchased Twitter in late October.
On the day the sale went final, he fired at least four top executives at the company.
Later, Twitter laid off half its workforce, with tweets by staff of the social media company saying the team responsible for human rights was among those affected. Days later, key security executives resigned from the platform.
Last week, Twitter suspended several high-profile journalists who have been covering the company and Musk.
Among the accounts suspended are those of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster.
Musk indicated that the suspensions stemmed from the platform's new rules banning private jet trackers. He was responding to a tweet from Mike Solana, vice president of venture capital firm Founders Fund, who noted that the suspended accounts had posted links to jet trackers on other websites.
"Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not," he added in another tweet.
On Saturday, however, Musk reinstated the suspended accounts after running a Twitter poll asking users whether those journalists should be reinstated.