Twitter Is Now Responding To Professional Inquiries With Emojis
Contacting Twitter's press department will result in a single response every time-- the poop emoji.
In November, Twitter’s communication team was supposedly laid flat by layoffs after Elon Musk took over, and they’ve been radio silent ever since. For the first time in months, though, the press email is active, and you can reach out to Twitter’s press team on the app or via email with one catch: the response will be a poop emoji. While this has the flavor of a low-level employee’s prank, it was confirmed by Elon Musk in a Tweet on Sunday.
Even news sources like NPR, who reached out to Twitter for comments on the new response strategy, got nothing but the poop emoji as an answer. Many Twitter users, who feel the overall user experience has suffered since Musk took over, think the new emoji press strategy is just a more literal expression of the company’s policy as a whole. Musk, who sees himself as a free speech activist, may well see the poop emoji press policy as a somewhat absurd expression of free speech, but if there’s anything Musk’s tenure as the head of Twitter has taught us, it’s that saying whatever you want isn’t usually great for business.
Musk has faced backlash over his laissez faire approach to Twitter’s content moderation, as well as his reinstating of various banned accounts, including former president Donald Trump’s. It’s hard to take Musk’s commitment to free speech seriously when he also banned the accounts of several journalists who report on the locations of private jets, including his own, using publicly available information. Though he was quick to reinstate their accounts after widespread backlash, it hurt his reputation as an advocate for free speech and puts Twitter in the same category of platforms that Musk purportedly hates—censored.
Free speech also clearly doesn’t equal effective speech, though Musk doesn’t seem to care; this isn’t the first or only time he’s used the poop emoji in a less-than-funny situation; he also uses Twitter—and the poop emoji—to troll those he disagrees with. Many avid Twitter users, on both sides of the political spectrum have left Twitter for other social media platforms that are better regulated and less of a chaotic free-for-all. Though a poop joke is an old classic, one has to wonder if the press relations of a huge, wildly influential platform is the place for it.
Musk seems to actively believe that the “press” in general should not be believed, so it’s not surprising that he puts so little stock in the press of his own enterprises. Fans of Musk, much like fans of Donald Trump, are often obsessed with idea of fake news, or the theory that any reporting, news, or evidence that clashes with their worldview is simply not real. Within this worldview, it makes sense that a press release could be a poop emoji—it’s valueless in that it doesn’t hold any objective fact—but while Twitter responds to serious inquiries with a 12-year-old’s favorite emoji, the rest of the world may very well be moving on to bigger and better things.
