SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk’s Twitter account was briefly suspended for violating the site’s new parody guidelines after he was discovered tweeting in the guise of a “successful entrepreneur.”
The sudden crackdown comes following a botched rollout of Twitter’s new $8 verification system which spawned hundreds of fake accounts masquerading as celebrities, corporations, and rational, intelligent businesspeople.
According to sources inside Twitter headquarters, Musk was seen screaming at the several initially fired and then re-hired engineers to get his account back online. Ranting to the team as they worked that “‘he was obviously joking” and “they just didn’t understand comedy,” while scrolling through his phone for the perfect 4-year-old meme to retweet.
The tweet in question that caused Musk’s account to be taken down was “Twitter is doing very well!” A statement flagged as misinformation by moderators, citing the advertisers fleeing the platform driven away by the actions of its erratic new CEO and the website purportedly losing $4 million dollars daily.
“While Elon’s business failings are common knowledge, it’s still important that he specify that he’s engaging in parody while pretending to be someone with the self-awareness and business acumen to run a corporation,” said Indira Gupta, a Twitter moderator. “As we saw when he somehow convinced Las Vegas that his Tesla Tunnel was a good idea, even the most blatant misinformation can spread like wildfire on social media.”
At press time, Musk’s account has been suspended again, this time for attempting to portray his purchase of Twitter as a defence of free speech rather than a defence of his own paper-thin ego. Twitter’s moderator team suggested adding “parody” to his account name in the future despite the unlikelihood of anyone ever taking him seriously again.
