Shortly after Elon Musk fired a Twitter engineer for suggesting his popularity has declined, users have been reporting a sudden avalanche of tweets from Musk appearing in their “for you” feed — even for those that don’t typically see his posts.
Breitbart News previously reported that Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, recently met with a group of engineers and advisors at Twitter’s headquarters to discuss the drop in engagement on his Twitter account. “This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Elon Musk Photographer: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg
One of Twitter’s two remaining principal engineers presented a Google Trends chart and internal data that showed Musk’s popularity score had decreased from 100 in April of last year — the maximum score possible — to just nine this month. The engineers had previously looked to see if Musk’s reach had been artificially constrained by the tools typically used to shadowban and limit the reach of conservatives. However, they had not discovered any indications of algorithmic bias. “You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk reportedly told the engineer who presented the chart telling him the ugly truth — people just don’t aren’t into Elon Musk as much these days.
Now, Engadget reports that some users have been confused and frustrated by Twitter’s “For You” algorithmic feed after noticing a strange pattern: a lot of Elon Musk’s tweets and replies are suddenly showing up, even for users who didn’t see or interact with Musk’s posts in the past. This prompted Twitter’s CEO to acknowledge the issue with a meme (likely stolen from another Twitter user).
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
As of February 2023, Elon Musk had more than 63 million followers on Twitter, making him one of the most-followed people on the platform. Musk has been extremely active on the platform for years, but has increased his use of Twitter since being appointed CEO of the company.
So why are so many users seeing more tweets and replies from Elon Musk? Some people think that Musk might have made the change. Following Musk’s firing of the senior engineer who questioned his popularity, he tweeted that a fix was coming after a “long day at Twitter HQ with eng team.” He claimed that an issue with something he called “Fanout,” a system for distributing messages to multiple servers, was the reason why 95 percent of his tweets weren’t getting delivered to the Following feed. According to Musk, the Recommendation algorithm was malfunctioning, “causing accounts with many followers to be dumped.”
Shortly after many noted that they were seeing more tweets from Musk, the Twitter CEO tweeted: “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh… ‘algorithm.’” The quotation marks around “algorithm” may imply a sarcastic admission that the algorithm is not as objective or automated as it might seem, but that Musk had a direct involvement in his increased visibility on the platform.
Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
So, what is the solution for users who are tired of seeing more Elon Musk than they bargained for on their feeds? One option is for them to simply use the chronological “Following” feed to view only the tweets they want to see at the exact moment they occur.
Read more at Engadget here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan