The severity of the situation was made clear as sleepy engineers logged on to their computers. Elon Musk’s tweet during the Super Bowl was ignored more than Senator Joe Biden’s tweet.
On Monday morning, Twitter CEO James Musk sent a critical message to the company’s engineers.
Musk, a cousin of Twitter’s CEO, wrote “We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” in Slack, tagging “@here” to ensure that everyone online would see it. “ 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.”
Almost 29 million people saw Biden’s tweet showing his approval of his wife’s Philadelphia Eagles fandom.
Musk’s tweet showing his support for the Eagles got nearly 9.1 million of viewers before he deleted it in apparent frustration.
After both teams’ losses (the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs and Musk to President Trump), Musk took his private jet to San Francisco late that Sunday night to confront his staff.
Musk Threatens to Fire Engineers Over Tweet Issues.
The fallout from that meeting reverberated around the world as soon as a day later. Twitter users who opened the app saw Musk’s posts overflowing their feeds. Platformer claims this wasn’t a fluke because Musk threatened to fire the rest of his engineers. Unless they came up with a way to promote Musk’s tweets to their entire user base. Something that had never been done before.
Recent weeks have seen Musk fixated on the volume of feedback he receives on his social media posts. He let one of the firm’s two top engineers go last week. After that employee told him that interest in Musk and his tweets had waned. Which contributed to a drop in the number of times those tweets were viewed.
Engineers Work Overnight to Fix Musk’s Tweet Error.
Musk delivered a personal message to his staff late on Sunday night. Within a short period of time, the project had risen to become the company’s highest priority, requiring the participation of roughly 80 workers. To figure out why Musk’s tweets weren’t attempting to reach as many people. As he had hoped, the team laboured through the night.
According to the engineers, one explanation is that Musk’s audience engagement may have decreased. As a result of his recent blocking and muting. Many people had already begun to exclude Musk. From their news sources during his time as Twitter CEO, long before the weekend’s events.
Technical Reasons for Musk’s Tweet Issue.
In the past, Twitter’s For You tab has prioritized the content of users whose tweets performed well among both followers and non-followers.. Musk’s tweets were supposed to follow this pattern, but according to internal estimates, they appeared roughly twice as frequently as some engineers expected.
On Monday afternoon, the “issue” was closed. All of Musk’s tweets have been “greened” automatically by Twitter, meaning they are being shown to more people despite Twitter’s best efforts to filter out low-quality content. The algorithm has now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets’ ranking by a factor of a thousand, giving his tweets a higher ranking than anyone else in the feed.
Musk’s Tweets Dominate Feeds Due to “Power User Multiplier”.
Inside the company, it is recognized as the “Power User Multiplier,” but Elon Musk is the only user who benefits from it. Twitter’s heuristics prevent a single account from dominating the major rating feed, now called “For You,” but Musk’s account has been able to circumvent these restrictions thanks to some clever coding.
That’s why, on Monday, everyone who followed Musk and millions more who didn’t see a dozen or more of his tweets and replies when they opened the app. Estimates from within the company suggest that Musk’s tweets are now being seen by more than 90% of his followers
Musk Social Media Controversy Impacts.
Musk admitted to flooding users’ feeds with his own version of the inappropriate meme:
Musk’s antics are ridiculous. But they bring to light a problem that almost everyone who uses social media has faced. How come some posts are more popular than others?
The engineers at both TikTok and Instagram may know the answers to some of these questions. However, ranking algorithms make predictions based on hundreds of thousands of signals. Finally, posts will be seen by millions of users. And it will be next to impossible to control who sees what.
According to Twitter data, Musk’s posts frequently receive 10 million or more views as the most popular user on the platform, with nearly 129 million followers. There are valid reasons to doubt the accuracy of these estimates, but more reliable data are lacking.
Twitter Engineers Plan Algorithm Changes
That’s exactly the kind of system Twitter engineers, who are worried about losing their jobs, are working on right now.
“A job applicant remarked, “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.” “He purchased the business, made a point of publicising what he claimed was faulty and manipulated under prior management, and then exploited the platform to impose interaction on all visitors to listen to only to his message.”
This discrepancy can be explained by the widespread belief that some tweets are better than others.
However, this need not be the situation. Additionally, you can adjust the algorithms used to determine post visibility, guaranteeing that your content will always be seen.
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