Elon Musk’s Press Poop Policy
Twitter now sends automatic 💩 to media enquiries. How long until other companies follow suit?
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Elon Musk has been in a very long and unhealthy relationship with the media, bordering on the obsessive. Musk may have crossed that border today with a lewd and lurid gesture to the media.
This means anyone sending an email to press@twitter.com receives an automatic feces emoji as a reply.
I can confirm it works.
Journalists writing about Twitter would email press@twitter.com to get official reaction. For instance, stories about workers rights at Twitter, how Twitter handles misinformation, disinformation, and other shitty activity on its platform— will now, under Twitter’s new media policy, be answered with an automatic:
“Twitter responded to requests for comment with a poop emoji sign.”
What are journalists to understand from this automatic response to any media query, no matter how much it’s in the public interest? What is a reader meant to take from this? Is it an insult just to the press, or to their readers too?
We know Musk is contemptuous of the press. This is his opinion and he’s entitled to it.
He has also taken active steps to ban some of them on Twitter.
Instead of an automatic and autocratic turd, Mr. Musk could have opted for a simple “no comment.” Not responding to requests for comment can take several forms and is totally legit in many circumstances. You don’t answer the phone. You don’t respond to multiple emails. You become a ghost. It’s a response without a response. Anyone who’s ever been dumped that way knows the feeling.
Still, responding with a “no comment” is classier than a ghosting, and definitely classier than sending a turd.
It would have been even easier to just disable press@twitter.com and be done with it.
But Mr. Musk chose a turd. It’s petty. It reeks of frustration. And it’s a distraction from the bigger issues Twitter faces. Something seems to have set Musk off. It may have been this excellent story by The Financial Times’ Hannah Murphy and Ivan Levingston.
The story seems well-sourced with insiders and “people familiar with the matter,” which may have annoyed Mr. Musk. I get it. The press can and often do get facts wrong. Many times the press manufacture mountains out of molehills. The press is far from perfect. But are they all 💩?
What does it say that the world’s most famous entrepreneur, potentially the Leonardo Da Vinci of our time, and the richest person in history, paints the press as poop? Do his legions of fans automatically agree? That is quite likely.
So is any of this important? Why should anyone care?
For one, Mr. Musk owns Twitter, a firehose of information used by hundreds of millions around the world. News travels fast there. Fake news travels even faster. Having a contempt for the press and assuming you don’t need to answer any questions about anything is irresponsible. It could attract even more scrutiny. It should attract more scrutiny. God knows what’s really going on there and how it’s affecting events, countries, markets, and hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Second, Mr. Musk could decide to extend the press poop policy to his other companies. So poop for press@spacex.com, press@tesla.com (press team was fired in 2020), press@neuralink.com, and press@boringcompany.com. Is Musk going to impose an unaccountable culture at those companies too?
Could other companies pick up on the scent? Will Musk’s Press Poop Policy be their inspiration? Is this Peak Poop Peer Pressure?
There is precedence. When Mr. Musk took over Twitter last October, he fired half of the company’s 7,500 workforce. Then he fired more in a hardcore Spartan code-to-the-death Hunger Games purge.
And then as if a dam had been burst, tech companies everywhere fired hundreds of thousands of employees in a massive barrage.
Yes, there is an economic downturn that’s hitting tech. But no, big tech isn’t struggling for money. They’re firing large numbers of people because they can. Someone showed them the way. Above all, it was the way the layoffs were done that evidenced a mass contempt for employees.
And so what if more companies start sending automatic poop emojis to the media? Again, some of those decisions could be completely legitimate, and every case of media bias, sensationalism and inaccuracy should be checked on its own merits.
Painting all media enquiries as 💩 will just harm the customers, employees, and shareholders of those companies the most; they won’t know who or what to believe. If the media is automatically discredited, but things aren’t right at the company either, things don’t add up.
If every allegation is automatically pooh-pooh’d, the media will just get more dogged; customers, employees, and investors will ask more questions. Companies will become more defensive and suspicious of their own employees and investors. The latter will be more incentivized to leak and speak to the press. It’s not a healthy relationship.
Antagonism breeds antagonism. An eye for an eye and a poop for a poop.