Twitter Comms 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 [a poop emoji].”

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

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 inquiries.
(Credit: 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 at his companies.

In 2020, for example, he dismantled Tesla’s press office. Defending the move 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.

The Slack outage came amid a string of cost-cutting efforts that the social media site has made since Musk completed his $44 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. 

Earlier this month, Musk made a communications gaffe after he joked about a laid-off employee not doing any work. He later apologized (perhaps after a conversation with what remains of Twitter’s legal department). It’s “better to talk to people than communicate via tweet,” he said.