Twitter engineers developed a system with the purpose of providing exclusive promotion to Elon Musk’s tweets. When Biden tweeted that he’s rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles with his wife, the tweet went wild and got almost 29 million views. Meanwhile, Musk tweeted his support for the Eagles too, but only got around 9.1 million views before he got fed up and deleted it.
In less than 24 hours, the impact of that meeting was felt globally as Twitter users opened the app only to find their ranked timeline bombarded by Musk’s posts. As it turns out, this was not a coincidence, according to Platformer: after Musk threatened to fire the engineers who were left, they came up with a system aimed at guaranteeing that Musk and only Musk receives exceptional promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
The engineers said that one reason for Musk’s reduced Twitter reach could be that many folks had blocked or muted him in recent months. Even before the weekend fiasco, people had already been filtering him out of their feeds because he’s been dominating the Twitter scene, especially after his company’s whopping $44 billion acquisition.
Following the Monday outrage caused by Musk’s Twitter takeover, he appeared to imply that there might be a partial reversal of the changes. “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh… ‘algorithm’,” he tweeted.
And I thought I was getting overly anxious about performance figures. Daddy, chill.
