- Musk’s Super Bowl tweet received way lesser engagement compared to Joe Biden’s
- Musk threatened to fire employees and ordered 80 engineers to build a system that could maximize engagement for his tweet
On Super Bowl Sunday, during the first quarter of the game, Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted to show his support for the Philadelphia Eagles.
The tweet said, “Go @Eagles!!!” surrounded by US flag emojis. The tweet got around 9.1 million impressions. In comparison to which, the tweet from US president Joe Biden received a way bigger number, 29 million impressions.
When Kansas City Chiefs appeared as the winners, Musk’s tweet disappeared.
As reported by Mashable, the next day, as Mashable previously reported, Twitter users suddenly started reporting that their “For You” feeds on the platform were filling up almost entirely with tweets and replies from Elon Musk.
And according to a report published by Platformer, Elon Musk deleted his tweet and asked his engineers to build a system that can boost impressions of his tweets.
According to Platformer, people familiar with the matter told the platformer that Elon Musk’s cousin James Musk had sent an internal message via Slack to Twitter’s engineers at 02:26 AM on Monday morning – asking around 80 engineers to work on the issue.
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote James Musk, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone 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.”
As reported by the Platformer, Elon Musk flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.
The team implemented an algorithm fix that boosted Elon Musk’s tweets by showing them in almost all Twitter users’ feeds on Monday.
The Twitter CEO also fired one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told Musk that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined in general.
Musk’s deputies threatened the engineering team saying that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.
Hearing about the news, many Twitter users shared that Musk’s manipulation of the Twitter algorithm shows his jealousy towards Biden. He acquired Twitter in the name of promoting free speech but now tweaking the platform boost his own voice on the platform.
On similar lines, a current employee of Twitter told Platformer,
“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 a current employee. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”
