Approximately 9 million individuals cast their vote in a Twitter poll by Elon Musk, indicating the return of Mr. Trump.
The new CEO of Twitter went to the site on Friday night, polling his followers on whether or not they thought the former U.S. president should be reinstated after being suspended.
Before the riot on January 6, 2021, in front of the U.S. Capitol building, Trump was temporarily barred from using Twitter because of concern that he may use the site to incite violence. In terms of the survey, participation was massive.
Musk published the poll at around 7:00 PM, and it quickly attracted millions of responses.
“Trump poll getting ~1M votes/hour!,” Musk tweeted. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter in 2021 “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
More than 8 million people have voted, and almost 52% of them have chosen “yes” with 10 hours to go. Roughly half of those polled said “yes”.
On Friday morning, Musk sent out a series of emails to the remaining employees, requesting that “everyone who actually builds software” come to the company’s headquarters.
Twitter employees are exiting the company in numbers after they reportedly received an ultimatum from Elon Musk to either commit to working in an “extremely hardcore” fashion at the company or leave the job. The new Twitter chief called for working long hours at high intensity. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” he added. Employees had until 5 pm ET Thursday to decide.
Going by the internal Slack messages, engineers and other employees started bidding adieu to a “watercooler” chat group in the run-up to the 5 pm ET Thursday deadline Musk enforced on Wednesday.
The group was flooded by salute emojis (which convey the message “thank you for your service”) along with dozens of goodbye messages, the report added. It’s not clear as to how many employees had resigned so far, the report noted. “The train has started in #social-watercooler,” said one of the employees in reference to a Slack room that employees are taking to in the last weeks to notify others that they are leaving.
In his follow-up emails, Musk said managers said must meet with employees in person once a week or at least monthly and that managers could be sacked for allowing employees to work remotely if those employees do not prove, in his view, to be “excellent” or “exceptional.”
“If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below by Thursday evening,” he said, directing to an online form. “Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful,” Musk added. Since Musk took the reins of the company, he fired at least 20 employees at Twitter who criticised his actions either on Twitter or on the internal messaging platform Slack and some were sacked just for retweeting posts slamming the new Twitter CEO.
