Twitter CEO Elon Musk claims that due to a bug on the platform, his replies were temporarily visible in the main feed as well as posts; and impressions of the tweets themselves did not exceed the “normal level”.

At the beginning of the week, many Twitter users noticed that “a lot” of Elon Musk appeared in the feed. If previously 2-3 publications of the billionaire were displayed on the “For You” page, on Monday their number increased to at least 6. The Verge, based on comments from its own sources on Twitter and documents obtained by Platformer, reported that the order to change the algorithms” came from Elon’s cousin, James Musk.

The reason for such an aggressive thirst for coverage was the publication of US President Joe Biden about the Super Bowl, which received three times more views than a similar tweet by Musk (which he later deleted). It was reported that under threat of dismissal, Elon’s deputies forced employees to change the algorithms to increase their boss’s views. By Monday afternoon, Twitter had deployed code to automatically “show” all of Musk’s tweets and bypass the social network’s filters, artificially boosting the popularity of his posts by a factor of 1,000.

Musk immediately reacted to the changes with a meme, and after publications in the media and indignation of users, he wrote that engineers are correcting the algorithms.

He now claims that the number of tweets did not exceed “normal levels” and that some mainstream media sources reported this “erroneously”.

“A review of the likes and views of my tweets over the last 6 months, especially in relation to the number of subscribers, shows that this is not true. We did have a bug where replies briefly got the same visibility as the main tweets, but this has now been fixed,” he wrote on his account.

The average total resource mass incorrectly reported that my Tweets were reset to certain levels earlier this week.

Review of my Tweet likes & views over past 6 months, especially as a ratio of followers, shows this to be false.

We did have a bug that briefly caused…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2023

In the past, Musk has indeed repeatedly complained about reach, claiming that 95% of his tweets do not reach the audience. The media, citing conversations with employees, said that Elon fired one of the company’s top two engineers when he suggested that the drop in coverage was due to a drop in public interest in the billionaire.

Elon Musk says he will leave the post of Twitter CEO until the end of 2023