Twitter Allegedly Tweaked Its Algorithms To Prioritize Elon Musk's Tweets

Elon Musk, the billionaire and the eccentric entrepreneur, is extremely talkative on Twitter.

After acquiring it for $44 billion and become its Chief Twit, Musk has made numerous changes, as well as cutting costs to the extreme, just to ensure that the company is profitable.

But just like any other social media platforms, Twitter also deals with algorithms that aren't one size fits all solution.

Among others, the algorithms on Twitter may surface more tweets about something or someone, based on users' preferences, and who they've followed or interacted with.

But for Elon Musk, that is not good. Or to be precise, not good enough for him.

Some people on Twitter theorized that Musk may have tinkered with Twitter's algorithms, simply because many of them see too much of Musk.

People started complaining that their News Feeds contain more of Musk's tweets than usual. Even when Musk isn't tweeting, Twitter seems to surface even his older tweets higher up.

And in one occasion, Musk seemingly confirmed the speculation, by tweeting out a meme of a girl forcing another girl to drink milk.

Musk labeled the girl holding the milk bottle as "Elon’s tweets," and the girl being forced to drink the milk as "Twitter."

It all began when Twitter added public view counts for every tweet.

At the time, Musk promised that the feature would make Twitter more transparent.

"Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions," he tweeted.

Then, Musk decided to make his account private in order to see whether that affected his views.

Later, after a week, he called a meeting of Twitter’s advisors and engineers to ask why his account, which has nearly 130 million followers, was getting so little views.

"This is ridiculous," Musk said, as reported by the Platformer newsletter.

"I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions."

In the internal meeting, Musk was given a data regarding his engagement, alongside a Google Trends chart. His employees told him that Musk's popularity was declining.

Among the reasons, they told Musk that Musk’s reach might have been reduced because he’d been blocked and muted by so many people

Musk then tasked a number of engineers to investigate to see whether his reach had somehow been artificially restricted. Later, when they found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him, Musk was furious.

"You’re fired, you’re fired!" Musk said impulsively to one of the engineers.

Then Musk dramatically announced that two significant Twitter problems had been solved, which were mainly related to him.

He went on to explain that 95% of his tweets were "not getting delivered at all," and that the company’s engineers had fixed that issue.

Although he didn’t acknowledge the Musk-filled News Feed, the billionaire has indeed said that Twitter was tinkering with the algorithm.

“Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm,’” he said.

According to a report, Twitter had tweaked its algorithms to artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000.

This high number is to ensure that his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in users' feed.

Internally, this method is called a "power user multiplier," and at this time, it only applies to Elon Musk.

In an interview with Twitter employees who still work for Twitter, they described Musk as a man desperate to recoup what he had invested, and that he's doing that without any proper long-term strategy.

"We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy," one employee said.

"Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective."

The employee also added that Musk relies heavily on user replies to his tweets as product feedback, and this often baffles employees.

"There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense," one employee said. "And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense."

Musk, who has been included in Guinness World Records for becoming the first person who have lost $200 billion, leads a number of companies, all of which are different and unrelated to one another.

And Musk, sitting at the helm of all of the companies, have to maintain that "know-it-all" personality.

" [...] he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating," one employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

The less people work at Twitter, the more of their work is being handed to existing teams, which are already overstretched with things they have little understanding of.

"They have to become code archaeologists to dig through the repo and figure out what’s going on," one employee said.

And referring to Musk, he bought the company, and by also leading it, he is indeed the de facto leader.

"He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice," said one employee. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”

But again, fans of Musk think otherwise, and some have been praising the billionaire in the comments on many of his tweets.