Elon Musk vowed to make Twitter better for accepting a wide range of speech and decided to tweak content moderation policies. Comedian Tim Heidecker, known for his standup and TV shows decided to test the platform moderation under Elon Musk’s reign.
On Tuesday, 1 November Tim started the hashtag ‘TrumpIsDead’ on Twitter. He wrote a short series of tweets regarding the death of former United States president Donald Trump. He wrote,” Trump is dead(died badly),” continuing his tweet he tagged Elon Musk and wrote,”@elonmusk has suppressed this news (or has he?).”
Tim wrote,” Donald Trump Junior is now just plain Donald Trump.” “Many are using #TrumpIsDead to spread the word. Many are sad by the news”, he continued in a series of tweets, “I heard he died in a sad and sick way (not as a dog, but this reporting could change soon).”
Within an hour, #TrumpIsDead started trending on Twitter as thousands retweeted and Tim’s tweets gained more than 20,000 likes. Since the takeover of the platform, Elon has been an active user by tweeting multiple tweets and replying to people several times a day. On this matter, Elon hasn’t reacted yet. Trump’s office hasn’t commented on the incident either.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the platform has restricted the staff members’ ability to delete inaccurate, misleading, hateful, and inappropriate content. As a result, slurs and hate speech grew exponentially.
Although Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, ensured that twitter’s rules are still being implemented extensively amid the Musk transition. “This is exactly what we should be doing in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk,” Roth said.
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Commenters on Tim’s joke hopped quickly and started proposing numerous ways that Trump had died. Users speculated his death via a bee attack to find him in the toilet.
