platforms has interviewed Twitter employees to find out why people’s For You feeds became The Elon Musk show, and they said the company’s engineers actually built a system that benefited only their CEO. According to the post, Elon’s cousin and Twitter employee James Musk sent an urgent message on the company’s Slack on Monday morning. “We are debugging an issue with platform-wide commit,” he wrote, calling the situation “high urgency” and asking everyone who can write code for help. The situation? President Biden’s tweet about supporting the Philadelphia Eagles got more engagement than Musk’s.
The president’s tweet apparently generated nearly 29 million impressions, while Musk’s generated just 9.1 million before he deleted it. However, Musk’s problem with his tweets not getting as much engagement as he’d like started before the Super Bowl. platforms previously reported that it fired one of Twitter’s two remaining chief engineers because he suggested that Musk’s tweets no longer generate as many impressions because people are no longer as interested in what he says.
Around 80 Twitter employees have reportedly been tasked with investigating possible reasons for Musk’s declining engagement numbers, and considered the possibility that many people have blocked and muted him in recent months. However, they also looked at potential legitimate technical issues, as the website’s system should have automatically promoted tweets from users whose posts usually perform well.
The solution they came up with, platforms he says, is to implement code that would artificially increase Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring they rank higher than others in people’s feeds. As a result, more than 90 percent of Musk’s 128.9 million followers saw his tweets, and even those who don’t follow the Twitter owner continued to see his posts on their timeline.
While Musk didn’t speak at length on the subject, he acknowledged the change in his own way, specifically by posting the “forced to drink milk” meme. He also asked people be aware while Twitter made tweaks to the “algorithm” (their quote, not ours) after users started complaining about seeing all of Elon all the time. However, according to reports, the “tweaks” were not meant to remove his advantage entirely: according to platformsElon’s tweets are still artificially boosted, but by a factor of less than 1000. Simply put, users will still see a lot of your tweets, unless they choose to move to the Next tab.
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