Twitter employees have been questioned as to why many users’ “For You” feeds are being torched with Elon Musk-related content, and they claim the company’s engineers have developed a system that exclusively favors their CEO. James Musk, cousin of Elon and employee of Twitter, sent an urgent message on the company’s Slack on Monday morning. ” We are debugging an engagement issue on the platform »he wrote, calling the situation “very urgent” and asking anyone who knows how to write code to help us.
The problem ? President Biden’s tweet about his support for the Philadelphia Eagles got more engagements than Musk’s.
According to the reports, the president’s tweet had nearly 29 million impressions, while Musk’s only generated 9.1 million before it was deleted. However, Musk’s engagement problem with his tweets started before the Super Bowl. Platformer previously reported that Musk fired one of Twitter’s last two senior engineers, who suggested that Musk’s tweets weren’t getting as much traction anymore because people weren’t finding his comments interesting anymore.
About 80 Twitter employees have been assigned to analyze possible reasons for the drop in engagement of Musk’s tweets. They looked into the possibility that many people have blocked or muted it over the past few months.
The solution found is to deploy code that artificially multiplies Musk’s tweets by 1,000, so that they rank higher than everyone else’s in news feeds. As a result, more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9 million followers saw his tweets, and even those who don’t follow the Twitter owner continued to see his posts on their timeline.
Musk addressed the issue of his tweets’ declining engagement, albeit briefly, by posting a similarly titled “forced to drink milk” on Twitter. He also hinted at ongoing adjustments to Twitter’s algorithm in response to user complaints about the prevalence of Elon-related content. According to Platformer, Musk’s tweets continue to be favored by an artificial factor, but now with a weighting of less than 1,000. In sum, users will still see many Musk tweets unless they choose to upgrade. “Follow-up” tab.
Although Musk didn’t speak at length on the issue, he did acknowledge the change in his own way, including posting the meme. « forced to drink milk ».
He also asked people to stay tuned as Twitter made ‘algorithm’ adjustments after users started complaining about seeing Elon all the time. Elon’s tweets are still artificially boosted, but by a factor of less than 1000. In summary, users will still see a lot of his tweets unless they choose to switch to the Follow tab.
