Elon Musk has ordered major changes to Twitter’s algorithms after his post about the Super Bowl performed worse than a similar post by US President Joe Biden.
The Verge, based on comments from its own sources on Twitter and documents obtained by Platformer, writes that the order to “urgently change the algorithms” came from Elon Musk’s cousin, James, on Monday morning.
“We are fixing the problem with interaction on the platform. People who create dashboards and write software, please help fix the problem. This is very urgent,” James wrote in Slack.
When the sleepy engineers got on their computers, they saw the reason for the urgency: Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got almost three times less views than Joe Biden’s tweet.
As your president, I’m not picking favorites.
But Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 13, 2023
The president wrote that he would support his wife and cheer for the “Philadelphia Eagles” — the post garnered about 29 million views. While Musk’s post about supporting the Eagles (which he later deleted in frustration) only got 9.1 million views.
After the Eagles lost to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk was defeated by Biden, the CEO of Twitter urgently flew to a meeting with his engineers, who were trying their best to restore the popularity of the executive.
Musk has become more obsessive about his Twitter reach in recent weeks — last week he fired a chief engineer who suggested views on the social network were down because of a general decline in interest in the Elon persona. Deputies told the rest of the team this weekend that if the coverage issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would also lose their jobs.
About 80 people were involved in the project, which quickly became the company’s number one priority. Staff worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets were getting less reach and testing possible solutions. One hypothesis was that his reach declined due to the blocking of a large number of people who grew tired of Elon’s constant presence in the headlines after he acquired Twitter and introduced controversial changes to the social network.
At lunchtime on Monday, Twitter deployed code to automatically “show” all of Musk’s tweets and bypass the social network’s filters. The algorithm artificially boosted the posts’ “popularity” by 1,000 times, a constant that guaranteed they would rank higher than anyone else in the feed. Twitter calls it the “power user multiplier,” although it was only used for Elon Musk.
This explains why many users on Monday found a large number of posts from Musk in the feed – even those who were not subscribed to his account. According to Twitter’s internal estimate, more than 90% of Elon’s followers now see his tweets.
Twitter now shows all of Elon Musk’s posts – even to those who aren’t subscribed to him
Musk acknowledged his attack on the tape on Tuesday when he posted this meme:
Some of his tweets were sent on Monday as he spoke with engineers to see if their solutions were working. After a wave of outrage, Musk announced that the algorithms would make adjustments.
“Please stay tuned, we will be making adjustments to the e-mu… ‘algorithm,'” he wrote on Twitter.
The artificial incentives applied to his account remain in effect — though the multiplier is now below 1,000. Currently, a tweet with a “bottle-feeding” meme has received 140.3 million impressions; his next joke, previously posted on Reddit and satirically attributed to Abraham Lincoln, received 56.7 million views. Some of Musk’s tweets earlier this month garnered fewer than 8 million views.
Source: The Verge
