Elon Musk’s big tantrum: the reason all his tweets keep popping up

The wave of tweets and replies from Elon Musk that users have been seeing for several days in the “For you” section of Twitter turned out to be not a mistake, but something deliberate. Platformer showed that the company’s engineers created a special system designed to artificially cheat the tycoon’s tweetsafter the impression of a tweet he posted about the Super Bowl was significantly lower than a similar post shared by US President Joe Biden.

This prompted James Musk, Elon Musk’s cousin, to send a message to all of the company’s employees via Slack, the popular instant messaging app for businesses. The Twitter owner’s cousin, in part, explained that they were “debugging” a platform-wide bug and that they needed all available engineers to solve it. “Anyone who can create dashboards and write software, please help solve this problem. This is very urgent. If you are willing to help, please like this post,” he wrote last Monday at 2:36 am.

We reiterate that the error James Musk is referring to is the difference in reach of a tycoon’s tweet compared to a president’s tweet. Namely, both shared a post of support for the Philadelphia Eagles, one of the teams that played in the Super Bowl Finals. Elon’s post, however, I reached just over 9 million impressionsyes, bye Joe Biden’s tweet received about 29 million views..

Solution within reach of Elon Musk’s tweets

Platformer emphasizes that a team of about 80 employees has dedicated itself exclusively to investigating why the coverage of the mogul’s tweets has significantly decreased.

They appreciated the fact that many users have muted their tweets. or blocked his account after he bought the social network. However, also attributed this problem to legitimate technical reasonss in the platform recommendation algorithm. According to several engineers, Musk’s tweets took less time to appear than expected.

So the solution was to develop a system that could artificially increase the tycoon’s tweet count by a factor of 1,000, which is 1,000 times. causes messages to appear much more often than any other relevant message from another user. It also allows Elon Musk’s tweets to bypass the Twitter algorithm designed to recommend the best content in the “For You” section; This is why many users who are not following the tycoon have seen tweets and replies in their feed that are not needed or of little interest.

After complaints from many users, Elon Musk confirmed they will make some “tuning” to the algorithm. Settings that will presumably reduce the number of tweets. Currently, the system continues to artificially increase the posts of the tycoon, but with a coefficient of less than 1000 points.

Therefore, it is likely that not many posts will appear in the feed, but they will continue to be shown unnecessarily. In fact, the number of views on Musk’s tweets has increased significantly since the introduction of this system, averaging 45 million per post.