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Twitter Responds To All Email Inquiries From The Press With A Poop Emoji, 51-Year-Old Owner Elon Musk Reports

All inquiries from members of the press directed to Twitter’s official press email now receive the same automatic reply: a poop emoji.

Elon Musk, who bought the social media company for $44 billion last year, relayed the update on his own Twitter feed over the weekend. The 51-year-old billionaire’s report drew 80,000 likes and thousands of retweets and replies, some of whom posed the rhetorical question of how young Musk must be reveling in a poop joke. (Others noted that the barnyard stance on press relations for such a vast and influential platform is also not exactly the stuff of comedy).

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Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has elicited rounds of media backlash with several moves, including suspending journalists’ accounts and continually goading the media. “Some of the smartest people I know actively believe the press … amazing,” he wrote last month in one characteristic tweet.

Last December, the accounts of journalist Aaron Rupar, commentator Keith Olbermann, staffers at CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and a range of others went dark. Musk said Twitter’s rules against “doxxing” had been violated, though he did not get specific about the infractions. When a Twitter account dedicated to tracking the movements of Musk’s private jet flights gained a following, he yanked the account and said those who shared its information would also be subject to sanction.

The bans coincided with reporting about the chaotic start to Musk’s ownership of Twitter, when thousands of employees were laid off, advertisers fled and tech bugs accumulated. Around this same time, the Tesla and SpaceX chief decided to release the so-called “Twitter Files,” a tranche of internal documents.

Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, two now-independent writers with sizable followings who have become outspoken critics of the institutional media outlets where they once worked, were given exclusive access to the files. They purported to show how Twitter’s prior management censored speech on Twitter, something Musk has railed against and pledged to undo. But the release of the files coincided with the banning of dozens of journalists, with the contradiction too glaring to be overlooked in favor of extensive coverage of how tweets had been limited under the former regime.

Here’s Musk’s tweet about the press email’s automatic reply:

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