The IT Nerd

Something odd is happening over at Twitter. Elon Musk has locked his twitter account. Is he hiding something. Is he sick of hearing from people that Twitter sucks since he took over?

Actually, he is testing to see if the Twitter algorithm is broken. I’ll explain why this course of action seems odd to me. But here’s the sequence of events as best as I can figure out. Twitter users have noted that since Elon took over, their Twitter feeds have changed. All sorts of random tweets people’s “For You” feeds from accounts they weren’t following or had never interacted with. Elon acknowledged the issue and said that it was an algorithm update which had been fixed. But clearly that isn’t true as Elon’s friends complained that their engagement was down due to whatever he had done.

Then something weird was discovered. Users were seeing more engagement, such as likes and retweets, when they had locked their accounts. Now locking your account essentially makes tweets private and only visible to their current followers. So there should be less engagement not more based on that. But this was confirmed by one of Elon’s right wing friends:

Elon then responded with this:

Here’s why this is odd. The fact that Elon himself is testing this makes zero sense. Even with Twitter staff being decimated by Elon’s job cuts, surely he has programmers, engineers and developers who can test this stuff out and come up with a fix of some sort? I ask because by the time a CEO is in the trenches testing something himself, something is seriously wrong with the company. Another reason why this is an odd course of action by Elon is that he is essentially using a sample size of one, himself, to test this. Correct me if I am looking at this wrong, but that seems flawed. No?

In any case, I think that this highlights what is not only wrong with social media driven by algorithms, but it also illustrates that Elon’s changes have made Twitter worse and not better.

This entry was posted on February 3, 2023 at 8:21 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.