March 19 (UPI) — Controversial billionaire Elon Musk has announced that Twitter, which he purchased last year, will respond to inquiries from journalists with the poop emoji.
The email account for the company’s media relations team, which used to handle questions from journalists before Musk’s acquisition of the platform, went dark after the $44 billion purchase and his subsequent firing of thousands of employees.
“[email protected] now auto responds with [poop emoji],” the world’s second-richest man tweeted Sunday morning.
UPI sent an email to the account Sunday morning to test whether the account would reply and received a poop emoji in the reply.
Twitter users took to the platform to share their disgust with Musk, who claimed Saturday that the platform “is growing fast” without sharing any evidence of that claim.
“Huh, same as general user experience then,” tweeted Chris Rickett, a video editor with the British newspaper Metro.
Some users threatened to leave the platform while others just replied to Musk’s tweet with their own poop emoji.
That platform has appeared to suffer repeated and increasing woes since Musk’s purchase, with outages on the rise. Earlier this month, Twitter faced multiple tech issues that left users with broken links and issues with loading pictures.
Musk purchased the platform on the promise of promoting free speech, despite some journalists remaining banned from the platform for parodying the billionaire at the time of his purchase of Twitter.
He also briefly banned the accounts of some users who had reported on how to track the location of his private jet, though reportedly has not banned accounts that tracked the locations of other private planes.