More cringe is bound to appear on your Twitter timeline after it was revealed that Elon Musk changed the Twitter algorithm so it falls in his favor. The Twitter CEO, who promised he’d step down last year but hasn’t done it yet, used his ownership powers to make sure that his posts get the most priority so he can earn those sweet fake internet points and your attention.
A joint report by both The Verge and Platformer reported that the Twitter algorithm has changed so that tweets made by Musk would show up more often than before. This comes after it was discovered that a Super Bowl tweet made by US President Joe Biden, received three times more impressions compared to Musk’s. Biden’s tweet received over 29 million views while Musk only got 9.1 million, both showing support for their favorite sports team. But it seems more people were more interested in what Biden had to say compared to the Twitter CEO.
Due to this, Elon’s cousin, James sent a message to Twitter engineers to solve this “issue.” Based on internal messages received by both publications, it was made clear that engineers were ordered to “build a system designed to ensure that Elon Musk benefits from the exclusive promotion of his tweets.”
In other words, make sure whenever Elon tweets about something trending, like the Super Bowl or an election, his tweets would be the first ones to be seen by other Twitter users.
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform. Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
Engineers theorized that the reason for Musk’s low engagement was due to users blocking and muting the billionaire. This makes sense since he’s been posting cringe, and not everyone is a fan of the billionaire. But it could also be due to an old algorithm where it “promoted tweets from users whose posts perform better to both followers and non-followers” in the For You Tab.
Musk has been concerned about the lack of engagement that his tweets have been receiving ever since he’s become the new Twitter owner. During the first month of his ownership, users discovered that Musk unblocked himself from everyone’s accounts. Not to mention, he fired one of his engineers because his tweets received low engagement despite his millions of followers.
The “issue” was fixed on Monday, and all of Musk’s tweets received an artificial boost. So good luck finding ways to get this billionaire off your feed because he’s going to do whatever it takes to get your attention.