Twitter created a system to artificially boost Elon Musk’s tweets

Platformer talked to Twitter employees to discover why people’s For You feeds turned into “The Elon Musk Show.” The employees said the company’s engineers built a system that only helped their CEO. The article says that Elon’s cousin, James Musk, who works at Twitter, sent an important message on the company’s Slack on Monday morning. “We are debugging a problem with engagement across the platform,” he wrote, calling the situation “high urgency” and asking everyone who can write code to help. What’s going on? More people responded to President Biden’s tweet about cheering for the Philadelphia Eagles than Musk’s.

Almost 29 million people saw the president’s tweet, but only 9.1 million saw Musk’s before he deleted it. However, Musk’s problem with people responding to his tweets is less than he would like to start before the Super Bowl. Platformer said before that he fired one of Twitter’s two remaining principal engineers because he said that Musk’s tweets are getting fewer impressions because people are more interested in what he’s saying.

According to reports, around 80 Twitter employees were asked to investigate why Musk’s engagement numbers were declining. They did consider the possibility that many people had blocked and muted him in recent months. But they also looked into possible technical problems since tweets from users whose posts usually do well should have been promoted automatically by the website’s system.

Platformer says that the solution they came up with is to use code that would artificially boost Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000. This would ensure that his tweets show up higher in people’s feeds than anyone else’s. Because of this, more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9 million followers saw his tweets, and even people who didn’t follow the Twitter owner kept seeing his posts on their timelines.

Musk didn’t say much about the problem, but he did acknowledge it by posting the “forced to drink milk” meme. He also asked people to stay tuned while Twitter changed the “algorithm” (his word, not ours) because people were tired of seeing only Elon’s tweets. Platformer says Elon’s tweets are still boosted artificially but by a factor of less than 1,000. This is what “adjustments” reportedly meant. In the end, people will still see many of his tweets unless they switch to the Following tab.

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