Twitter responds to all email inquiries from the press with a poop emoji, reports owner Elon Musk (51)

All press questions sent to Twitter’s official press email now receive the same automated response: a poop emoji.

Elon Musk, who bought the social media company for $44 billion last year, announced the update on his own Twitter feed over the weekend. The 51-year-old billionaire’s account attracted 80,000 likes and thousands of retweets and replies, some of which rhetorically questioned how young Musk had to be to enjoy a poo joke. (Others have noted that for such a large and influential platform, the Scheunenhof attitude toward public relations isn’t exactly the stuff of comedy either).

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has provoked various media backlash with various actions, including banning journalist accounts and constantly insulting the media. “Some of the smartest people I know actively believe in the press…awesome,” he wrote in a signature tweet last month.

Last December, journalist Aaron Rupar, commentator Keith Olbermann, CNN staff members reported The New York Times, The Washington Post and a number of others went dark. Musk said Twitter’s rules against “doxxing” had been violated, though he did not comment specifically on the violations. When a Twitter account dedicated to tracking the movements of Musk’s private jet flights gained followers, he took down the account and said those sharing his information would also be fined.

The ban coincided with reports of a chaotic start to Musk’s ownership of Twitter, as thousands of employees were fired, advertisers fled and technical failures piled up. Around the same time, the head of Tesla and SpaceX decided to declassify the so-called “Twitter files”, a part of internal documents.

Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, two now independent writers with a significant following who have become outspoken critics of the institutional media in which they once worked, were given exclusive access to the files. They claimed to show how Twitter’s previous management censored the speech on Twitter, something Musk protested and promised to undo. But the release of the files coincided with the banning of dozens of journalists, the contradiction too glaring to be overlooked in favor of full coverage of how tweeting was restricted under the previous regime.

Here’s Musk’s tweet about the automated reply from the press email: