Twitter moved Musk tweets to top of user feeds: report
On Tuesday, Twitter users wondered why their timelines were showing so many tweets from Elon Musk. Now, a new report provides a reason: Elon Musk was upset that his tweet about the Super Bowl got fewer views than one from US President Joe Biden.
The Twitter CEO flew his private jet from the Super Bowl in Phoenix Sunday night to the Bay Area to complain about the relatively low engagement of his tweet, reports platformer, a newsletter by technology journalists Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton. After Musk ordered his staff to fix the problem, Twitter engineers had Musk’s tweets bypass the platform’s algorithms to determine the best content for users, landing Musk’s posts at the top of users’ feeds.
Biden’s tweet about the Super Bowl – in which the President cheered for the Philadelphia Eagles due to his wife’s connections to the city – currently has 29 million views. Elon Musk deleted his tweet supporting the Eagles after they lost, but the tweet reportedly received about 9 million views platformer.
On Tuesday, users on Twitter reported seeing more tweets from Musk on the platform’s “For You” tab, which shows users tweets based on their interests, including accounts they don’t follow. (The “Following” tab of the platform only shows tweets in reverse chronological order from accounts that the user is following).
The flood of Musk tweets was a deliberate consequence of changes to Twitter’s algorithm, platformer reports. The company hired 80 engineers to work to increase Musk’s engagement; This team allowed the CEO’s tweets to bypass protections that prevent one user’s tweets from dominating another’s entire feed.
(Musk first joked about his tweets overwhelming people’s accounts, then said Twitter will “adjustments” to his systems.)
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company no longer has a communications department to handle media inquiries.
Last Thursday, platformer reported that Musk is increasingly concerned about the low engagement of his tweets. At a meeting to discuss the reasons for this, one of the company’s top engineers attempted to explain that interest in Musk in general was declining, using a chart from Google Trends that recorded searches for “Elon Musk” as evidence .
Musk reportedly fired the engineer on the spot.
Musk’s deputies then told the engineers they would be fired if they didn’t address the issue of Musk’s declining engagement, they said platformer.
Elon Musk has one of the most followed accounts on the platform with 128 million followers. For comparison, Biden’s official Twitter account has 29.5 million followers.
The US president has long angered Musk, who believes the White House is downplaying Tesla’s electric vehicle manufacturing record in favor of legacy automakers like GM.
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