Elon Musk created a new system for showing his tweets to his audience before anyone else. The changes were made after Musk’s tweet during the Super Bowl game did not receive as much engagement as President Biden’s tweet.
Twitter Algorithm Changes: Musk’s Low Engagement Crisis
Twitter CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm after the incident. This story is based on interviews with insiders and supported by documents obtained by Platformer.
Late Monday night, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers asking for their help to solve a problem with engagement across the platform. The issue had to do with the low engagement of Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl. Biden’s tweet generated nearly 29 million impressions while Musk’s tweet got only about 9.1 million impressions before he deleted it.
Elon Musk’s Obsession with Tweet Engagement Leads to Controversial Twitter System
Twitter’s CEO flew back to the Bay Area to demand answers from his team after the Super Bowl game. Engineers built a system designed to ensure that Elon Musk benefits from exclusive promotion of his tweets. Within a day, Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. After Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk alone benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
Musk has been obsessed with the amount of engagement his posts are receiving. Last week, he fired one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining. His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs.
Twitter’s algorithm prioritizes Elon Musk’s tweets with “power user multiplier”
Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.
By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts 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”.
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Recommended reading: Unlocking the Potential of the Metaverse
Controversy as Elon Musk’s tweets dominate Twitter’s ranked timeline
Elon Musk’s tweets weren’t getting as much engagement as he wanted, so he threatened to fire his engineers. They created a system that artificially boosts Musk’s tweets, allowing them to bypass Twitter’s filters and rank higher in the feed. This has caused controversy as it means that Musk’s posts now dominate Twitter’s ranked timeline, with over 90% of his followers seeing his tweets.
Musk has acknowledged the situation, but it is unclear whether the changes will be walked back or not. The article highlights the tension around why some posts are more popular than others on social media.
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