The story could be taken from fiction, but it is true. Elon Musk and his entourage have threatened Twitter employees with firing if they don’t develop a system to increase the reach of the businessman’s tweets. Several testimonies collected by The Verge detail how Twitter became a Musk-centric social network in just a few days.
Elon Musk upset by his lower audience?
In reality, the multi-boss would be upset aftera tweet from Joe Biden during the Super Bowl was more successful in users’ News Feed than his own post. On the night of Sunday to Monday, the cousin of the businessman would have posted the following message in the Slack of the company: “We are debugging an engagement issue on the platform. Anyone who can build dashboards and develop software can help solve this problem. It’s very urgent.” The urgency was actually the supposed lack of visibility of Elon Musk’s latest tweets.
Quickly, a meeting was organized at the top. Musk and his deputies then allegedly threatened to fire the engineers if they did not develop a system to ensure that “Musk — and only Musk — gets unprecedented promotion of his tweets to all users”writing The Verge. A dedicated team of 80 people was immediately formed.
A system specially adapted for his tweets
The engineers then identified several supposed causes for the drop in viewership of Musk’s posts. Thus, many users would have blocked or hidden his account in their newsfeed. At the same time, legitimate problems in the recommendation algorithm have reportedly been identified by Twitter employees.
To guarantee a better audience for Elon Musk’s account, engineers have developed a system adapted to his profile. All of his tweets now bypass Twitter’s content filters. A unique privilege that has artificially vitaminized the messages of the multi-billionaire by a factor of 1000 in recent days.
Elon Musk “manipulates the platform to force the engagement of all users to hear only his voice”, protested an anonymous source at Twitter. For his part, Musk published an ambiguous tweet on Tuesday February 14, 2023, saying that the system of algorithms in place could be brought to evolve.