Amid a meltdown at Twitter, owner Elon Musk took the opportunity Friday to post a poll asking if Donald Trump’s account should be “reinstated” on the social media platform.
According to his tweet, there were nearly 5 million votes as of 7:47 p.m EST Friday. The survey was scheduled to run an additional 20 hours. No hints were provided about where the poll stood.
The former president was bounced off Twitter in January 2021 after his posts were viewed as helping to incite the deadly U.S. Capitol riot earlier that month.
Musk posted the survey as chaos at his company has drawn a deluge of visits from the curious.
Hundreds of additional Twitter employees appear to have left their jobs on Thursday after their new leader gave them an ultimatum to pledge to work “long hours at high intensity” — or leave.
Musk had already cut close to half of the workforce, from about 7,500 to 3,700 employees. Sources told The New York Times that an estimated 1,200 additional workers left Thursday, leaving the company “teetering on the edge.”
Engineering and content moderation departments have reportedly been decimated.
On Friday morning, Musk was reaching out to employees for help, according to company messages viewed by the Times.
“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today,” he wrote in one message seen by the Times. “Thanks, Elon.”
About 30 minutes later, Musk reportedly sent another email saying he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack,” which refers to a company’s software and related systems. In another email, he asked some people to fly to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to meet in person, according to the Times.
Lots of Twitter users, meanwhile, have raced to the site seemingly to run wild as fewer workers mind the store. Posters have set up scathing fake accounts, including some pretending to be Elon Musk and Tesla, and have reportedly been tweeting porn in the absence of content moderators.