Twitter now automatically responds to press enquiries with poop emoji

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Elon Musk says Twitter will now send all journalists an automatic poop emoji when they make a press request to the social media platform.

The billionaire tweeted out the new policy, saying “press@twitter.com now auto responds with (emoji).”

An email sent by The Independent to the Twitter press team on Sunday instantly received a poop emoji in return.

Mr Musk, who already has no press team at Tesla, fired the press team at Twitter during massive layoffs after he bought the company for an eye-popping $44bn last October.

Twitter fired around 50 per cent of its 7,500 employees after the South African-born businessman bought the company.

And it now has a workforce of around 2,000 as Mr Musk has sought to slash costs at the San Francisco company.

It is not the first time that Mr Musk has publicly used the emoji.

Last July, Twitter cited posts by Mr Musk, including one a single poop emoji, as evidence he had disparaged the company as he tried unsuccessfully to pull out of buying it.

Earlier this month Mr Musk apologised after a humiliating exchange in which he appeared to mock a disabled Twitter worker.

Mr Musk had accused his employee of doing no actual work, of being “the worst” and more – after he had asked whether he was still employed by Twitter, having apparently failed to get a response any other way.

The Twitter boss said that he had received bad information about the situation, and had now had a video call with the affected staff member to apologise.

Icelandic entrepreneur Halli Thorleifsson – who sold his company to Twitter and has been voted as the country’s person of the year – had sent a direct public tweet to the billionaire after he was locked out of his work’s computer system, telling Musk he could not get HR to respond to him.