It feels like a pointless exercise to call this out, but Musk himself has admitted that bots on Twitter are a problem. Wouldn't that mean that the results of this poll are bogus? Furthermore, the pool of voters is surely composed primarily of people who follow Musk's Twitter account, so pretty heavily biased. Of course, I don't actually believe Musk was trying to come at this decision logically.
Update: To clarify, I'm making a couple of points here: 1) Based on Musk's own statements, it feels hard to believe that he actually thinks this is a reasonable way to come to a decision on this issue and 2) it's reasonable to view the results of this poll as heavily biased, apart from the bot question. In Trump's case, I think there's actually a real debate as to whether or not his ban was justified. This does not feel like a sound way to reverse Twitter's decision. That should matter to both Trump's supporters and his detractors.
I'll put it another way. Musk could have claimed that he didn't want to ban political speech that was not directly calling for violence because slippery slope and all that. I still wouldn't have agreed with him, but at least I would have felt better about that. That would have at least indicated that he was interested in determining what was right. Instead, he justified his actions with a poll that seems patently unreliable, shirked responsibility for his decision, and threw in some poorly deployed Latin as a heady sounding justification. I'm not at all convinced that he would have maintained Trump's ban if the results would have come out the other way.
Update: To clarify, I'm making a couple of points here: 1) Based on Musk's own statements, it feels hard to believe that he actually thinks this is a reasonable way to come to a decision on this issue and 2) it's reasonable to view the results of this poll as heavily biased, apart from the bot question. In Trump's case, I think there's actually a real debate as to whether or not his ban was justified. This does not feel like a sound way to reverse Twitter's decision. That should matter to both Trump's supporters and his detractors.
I'll put it another way. Musk could have claimed that he didn't want to ban political speech that was not directly calling for violence because slippery slope and all that. I still wouldn't have agreed with him, but at least I would have felt better about that. That would have at least indicated that he was interested in determining what was right. Instead, he justified his actions with a poll that seems patently unreliable, shirked responsibility for his decision, and threw in some poorly deployed Latin as a heady sounding justification. I'm not at all convinced that he would have maintained Trump's ban if the results would have come out the other way.