‘Unhappy’ Elon Musk forced algorithm changes to boost his tweets: report
Musk’s tweet in support of the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday got significantly less engagement than US President Joe Biden’s tweet. His Super Bowl tweet got nine million impressions while Biden’s got 29 million.
Musk has nearly 129 million followers, whereas 37 million follow Biden.
The Twitter CEO was unhappy with the engagement on his tweet and reportedly threatened to fire several of the company’s engineers. Later, 80 engineers built a system so that his tweets would be viewed by more users, according to Platformer.
The engineers investigated “various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should”, as per the report.
Later, Twitter excluded Musk’s tweets from filters designed to improve the quality of users’ timelines and artificially boosted them by a factor of 1,000.
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The engineers were able to send out a code that would allow Musk’s tweets to bypass the algorithm and boost his posts by a factor of 1,000 by using a tool called the “power user multiplier,” which only has been applied to Musk, according to the report.The algorithm change comes several weeks after Musk fired a Twitter engineer over less engagement on his page.
However, this resulted in users’ feeds being flooded with Musk’s tweets.
Several people took to the social media platform saying that the ‘For You’ section is full of tweets and replies to tweets from Musk.
The Twitter CEO later acknowledged the boost in his tweets’ views and wrote, “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm.”
Last week, Musk said Twitter rolled out some sort of change to fix this “visibility” issue, adding that 95% of his tweets weren’t “getting delivered.”
Earlier, he had tweeted a meme suggesting his tweets were going to be force-fed to Twitter users.
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