Elon Musk news - live: Musk dumps $4bn worth of shares in Tesla shares as personal wealth drops below $200bn

Elon Musk has mocked Mastodon, the alternative site many are embracing as they look to move away from Twitter.

Many high-profile users have signed up to use Mastodon, an open-source alternative to Twitter, since Elon Musk’s takeover.

Mr Musk appeared to mock those switching over to the alternative platform, referring to the site as “Masterbatedone” in now-deleted posts.

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Human rights non-governmental organisation Amnesty International expressed concern over Twitter laying off its “entire human rights team and AI ethics team”.

Amnesty International - Technology, a global collective of advocates, hackers, researchers and technologists defending digital rights, said Twitter has failed to address hateful and abusive speech on the microblogging platform.

It said Twitter must have “operational structures” in place to address harmful and abusive conduct on its platform, Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

However, the NGO said, it is “hard to see” how Twitter can uphold this responsibility following its recent mass layoffs.

“Advertisers also must respect rights. They must carefully weigh Twitter’s human rights record and the impact of Twitter’s recent staff cuts, when deciding whether to advertise on the platform,” it said.

American actor and talk show host Whoopi Goldberg becomes one of the latest in a string of celebrities to announce she is abandoning Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover.

“It’s been a little over a week since Elon Musk took over Twitter and this place is a mess,” Ms Goldberg said.

“I’m getting off today because I just feel like it’s so messy, and I’m tired of now having certain kinds of attitudes blocked now getting back on. So I’m gonna get out, and if it settles down enough and I feel more comfortable maybe I’ll come back. But as of tonight, I’m done with Twitter,” she added.

The talk show host cited Mr Musk’s firing and rehiring of Twitter staff as well as the barring of comedian Kathy Griffin’s account as some of the other reasons why she decided to quit the platform.

“Some speech is not OK free speech. So everybody has to agree on that, but if people keep saying ‘You hurt my free speech’ it’s going to be a problem. You know what? This is our problem. But it ain’t my problem today because I’m out,” Ms Goldberg said.

Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk urged voters to back Republican candidates ahead of the US midterm elections months after saying that the social media platform must remain “politically neutral.”

“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” the multibillionaire had tweeted in April, months before taking over the company in October.

On Monday, he tweeted, urging “independent-minded voters” to vote for Republican candidates.

“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” Mr Musk said.

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Twitter has suspended the account of Stephanie Doute, the executive director of the California League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan voter education organisation, hours before the US midterm elections with “no explanation.”

“On Election Day eve, Twitter has suspended @sdoute, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of California @LWVC on the eve of midterm elections,” The League of Women Voters of San Francisco tweeted.

“No warning. No explanation. No way to appeal. What is next?,” it said.

Twitter’s staff working on the platform’s revamped Twitter Blue subscription service – a project new boss Elon Musk is deeply involved in – are reportedly working “20 hour days.”

“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” an employee told Platformer.

One of the company’s staff had earlier tweeted that she slept at her office to meet deadlines.

“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you sleep where you work,” Esther Crawford, who is in charge of early-stage products at the company, said last week.

Twitter Blue, one of Elon Musk’s pet projects since taking over Twitter to revamp the platform’s subscription service, reportedly faces several “larger problems” going ahead.

Twitter Blue currently has over 100,000 active subscribers and it will be an uphill task to expand the revamped version of the service for widespread rollout, according to Platformer.

The new version will reportedly be 37.5 percent more expensive and it is unclear how the social media company would persuade users to pay and subscribe to the service.

Twitter may likely “lose money” on this service if current plans to reduce ad load by half for its subscribers are enacted, the report noted.

Mr Musk is also reportedly helming heavy control over teams working on the launch of Twitter Blue.

“There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to Platformer.

Twitter’s policy states that account names must indicate a parody account. It banned impersonating profiles from the platform unless they explicitly mentioned they were parody accounts.

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended,” Mr Musk tweeted yesterday.

But The Verge reported that several of its staff with verified accounts have not been able to change their screen names on Twitter to mark themselves as parody.

After thousands of Twitter’s employees were laid off last week, many of the remaining staff reportedly did not know who their managers were for days.

Remaining managers are also bracing for a steeper workload, Platformer reported, citing sources close to the matter.

Some of the remaining employees are reportedly “just sitting around.”

“No chain of command, no priorities, no organisation chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is,” one employee told Platformer.

Eugen Rochko, the founder and chief of Twitter rival Mastodon, said in an interview on Sunday that Elon Musk was “not entirely comprehensible” about his takeover of the microblogging platform.

Mr Rochko called the Tesla titan’s purchase of the platform an “impulse decision that he soon regretted,” adding that the multibillionaire must now “deal with the fallout.”

The Mastodon chief also criticised Musk’s stance on free speech on Twitter.

“So allowing free speech by just allowing all speech is not actually leading to free speech, it just leads to a cesspit of hate,” he told Time Magazine.