The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has conducted a poll asking Twitter’s users to decide if he should stay in charge of the social media platform.

Musk conducted the 12-hour poll via a tweet on his verified Twitter account on Monday after acknowledging he made a mistake on Sunday in launching new speech restrictions that banned mentions of rival social media websites.

“Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” Musk tweeted.

At of time of filing this report, 57 per cent want Musk to resign as CEO, while 43 per cent want the Tesla boss to continue to run the microblogging site.

In yet another drastic policy change, Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited”.

But the move generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.

READ ALSO: Twitter bans users from promoting rival platforms

“My apologies. Won’t happen again,” he tweeted before launching the new poll asking if he should step down as the Twitter CEO.

The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.

The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former United States President, Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.

Twitter had said it would at least temporarily suspend accounts that include the banned websites in their profile — a practice so widespread it would have been difficult to enforce the restrictions on Twitter’s millions of users around the world.

Not only links but attempts to bypass the ban by spelling out “instagram dot com” could have led to a suspension, the company said.

The Star