Twitter’s Press Office Now Responds to Press Emails With Poop Emoji

Reporters contacting Twitter for comment are finally hearing back from the platform after months of silence—with a poop emoji.

Announcing the move in a tweet(Opens in a new window) Sunday morning, Elon Musk said “[email protected] now auto responds with [poop emoji].”

PCMag reached out to Twitter to ask if the move was permanent and automatically received the emoji in question as a reply.

Twitter’s new automated response to press enquiries.
(Marco Marcelline)

Since the billionaire took over the company in October 2022, a downsized press department largely stopped replying to reporters’ attempts to reach out. As Forbes notes(Opens in a new window), Musk has a history of evading the press when it comes to his companies. In 2020, he completely dismantled Tesla’s press office, which remains defunct today.

Defending the lack of a Tesla press team in 2021, Musk tweeted(Opens in a new window): “Other companies spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion, Tesla focuses on the product. I trust the people.”

Meanwhile, in February Twitter employees lost access to Slack for days after the company manually switched it off.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

The Slack outage came amid a string of cost-cutting efforts that the social media site has made since Elon Musk completed his multi-billion takeover. After laying off more than half its global workforce, the company closed a Sacramento data center, shut a Seattle office, and cut janitorial workers and security staff across the US. 

And earlier this month, Musk found himself having to make a volte-face by apologizing to a former employee he had joked about and accused of doing no work at the company. 

Musk had mocked the ex-employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, in a series of tweets after Thorleifsson had tweeted him to ask whether he was still an employee at the company or not since he had not heard from HR.

After a video call with the employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, Musk said he was sorry for “misunderstanding his situation,” adding, it’s “better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.”