Our worst suspicions over why Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s tweets flooded user feeds on Monday have been confirmed. Twitter engineers intentionally created a special system to increase their boss’ view counts and the reason is just as petty as you can imagine.
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Hours after the Super Bowl ended, Musk’s cousin James sent a message marked “high urgency” to Twitter engineers in the middle of the night, the Platformer newsletter reported. James asked engineers for help solving a big problem, which had apparently made CEO Musk so mad that he had hopped on his private jet and was heading to San Francisco that night. The problem was not, as a reasonable person might expect, the Twitter outage that occurred during Rihanna’s halftime show on the platform’s biggest night of the year.
In fact, the issue was much more childish. Musk was pissed that President Joe Biden’s tweet wishing the Philadelphia Eagles good luck had gotten more engagement (29 million impressions) than his own tweet blessing the Eagles (9.1 million impressions), according to Platformer. In an apparent tantrum, Musk deleted his tweet about the Eagles after the team lost.
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Once Musk got to San Francisco, he summoned Twitter’s engineering team and told them that if they didn’t fix the engagement problem (*cough* increase the views on his tweets *cough*), he would fire them. Platformer found that about 80 Twitter employees were assigned to the task.
The team worked overnight to try to find out why their boss’ tweets weren’t as popular as they once were. One reason could be that Musk had gotten muted or blocked by many Twitter users sick of his constant antics, they theorized. However, it also didn’t make sense that Twitter’s system wasn’t promoting Musk’s tweets to his followers and non-followers as much as it should, which pointed to a possible technical issue.
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In the end, Twitter’s engineers created a special system to ensure more than 90% of Musk’s followers saw his tweets. The system allows Musk’s tweets to bypass Twitter’s content filters, which aim to show users the best tweets, as explained by Platformer. It also artificially boosts Musk’s tweets to guarantee they rank higher than anyone else’s in Twitter’s ‘For You’ feed. As a result of the change, many users were bombarded with Musk’s tweets in their feeds on Monday.
Musk seemed to confirm the new Twitter experience was filled with him, him, and mostly him, shortly after midnight on Tuesday. He tweeted out a famous meme of a girl forcing another to drink milk. In the meme, the girl holding the milk is labeled “Elon’s tweets” and the one being forced to drink the milk is labeled “Twitter.” Hours later, Musk informed the people that Twitter was making some “adjustments.”
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“Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm,’” he said.
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