San Francisco: Twitter CEO Elon Musk rolled out a poll on the platform for users on whether the US government should pardon whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, NDTV reports.
Musk tweeted that he is not expressing an opinion. He had promised that he would conduct the poll, he said.
Assange and Snowden are in exile after both exposed the wrongdoing and surveillance by the US military and intelligence. Assange is in an effort to block his extradition from London, while Russia granted Snowden citizenship in September. It is reported that Snowden reived a Russian passport too on Saturday.
Musk's poll received more than 5,60,000 votes within an hour, and most of the users voted for pardoning both. More than 79.8 per cent voted that both should be pardoned.
Elon Musk conducted several similar polls after taking over Twitter. He used such polls to take major decisions on the platform, like feedback on revised Twitter rules, reinstating previously blocked accounts etc. In one particular poll, he asked whether former president Donald Trump's Twitter handle must be reinstated, to which a slight majority voted affirmative.
Before reinstating banned accounts, Musk had tweeted, "Should Twitter offers a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?"