The IT Nerd

Yesterday, I posted a story on Tweets from Elon Musk being forced into your Twitter feeds. And in that story I said this:

I don’t see a fix coming for this soon as this is how Twitter is going to be under Elon. It’s basically become his own echo chamber where only the gratification of his ego matters. 

Well, Platformer who has been 100% accurate when it comes to the inner workings of Twitter under Elon Musk has once again scored the inside story on this. Starting with why this is happening:

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers. 

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.

So this all started because Elon’s ego was bruised. That’s really pathetic. And it further illustrates that decision making at Twitter is being done by whim and ego rather than facts. Anyway, this is what happened next:

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed. 

Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core ranked feed, now known as “For You.”

That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.

While this has been scaled back somewhat, it is mind blowing that his bruised ego has resulted in this. I encourage you to read this story as it is simply mind blowing what lengths that Elon will go to just to get what he wants.

And while I am at it, I have to point out that these leaks that Platformer is getting in such detail are coming from inside Twitter. That suggests to me that Elon has larger issues than his engagement levels.

This entry was posted on February 15, 2023 at 8:27 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.