Elon Musk’s disdain for the press is no secret. Tesla stopped answering press inquiries in 2020 and dissolved its public relations department.
After Musk bought Twitter, it too stopped responding to press inquiries. It’s widely believed that the entirety of the press office was included in the thousands laid off after he took over.
Twitter’s press office recently resumed responding to emails. But members of the media shouldn’t expect to learn much from Twitter’s response to their inquiries. Emails sent to Twitter’s press office are now prompting an autoreply that simply contains a poop emoji.
Musk tweeted about the change on Sunday.
The Daily Dot sent multiple emails to Twitter’s press office using separate addresses on Monday. In each case, the company fired back a poop emoji within seconds.
Musk’s right-wing fan—who also dislike media that doesn’t parrot things they already agree with—think the toilet humor is hilarious.
Others who would probably not consider themselves Musk sycophants also had fun with the new autoreply—though for much different reasons.
“Huh, same as general user experience then,” wrote one.
Many people fired off various questions and asked Twitter to respond with a poop emoji if the answer is yes.
It remains to be seen whether Twitter advertisers or the stock market will also be impressed by one of the world’s richest men having his $44 billion company’s press office autoreply with cartoon photos of smiling turds.
