Elon Musk has been taking all necessary efforts to turn Twitter into a “digital town square of democracy”. Even to the extent of ignoring his previous business ventures! In October 2022, he completed the buyout with the historic $44 billion deal. Since then, he has been taking radical steps and implementing strategic policies to bring revenue and traffic.
In some efforts, he succeeded in executing his vision, but at the cost of extreme repercussions. When the revenue started dwindling after advertisers pulled out their advertisements, he fired more than half of his employees to recover the cost. But, it turned into a saga of multiple layoffs at different junctures for varied reasons. Recently, he fired an engineer due to low engagement on his Twitter. However, there was a spike in his tweets. Is President Joe Biden the reason behind it?
Related: Why Is Twitter Just Showing Tweets Of Elon Musk On ‘For You’ Feed?
Elon Musk Was Unhappy With The Impressions On His Super Bowl Tweet
The new CEO, in a brash decision, fired an engineer due to low engagement on his Twitter account. Musk had a meeting with his engineers and advisors on why the impressions are lower and asked for a possible solution. The engineers proved that there are no external sources that hampered the popularity. When the Tesla owner announced the Twitter purchase in April 2022, he had a “100” which has now dipped to “nine”.
Elon Musk complained, “This is ridiculous. I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions”. After the firing fiasco, there was a sudden surge in tweets from Musk on Twitter’s ‘For You’ feed. Now, The Verge has reported that President Joe Biden sparked the changes in algorithms post the Super Bowl game.
The billionaire’s cousin James Musk sent a message on slack to all employees stating, “We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform”. The issue was that Joe Biden’s tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles got more impressions than Elon Musk’s tweet. Joe Biden’s tweet got approximately 29 million tweets and the business mogul’s tweet received only 9.1 million impressions. The tweet has been deleted since.
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Why Are Musk’s Tweets Appearing On The ‘For You’ Feed?
Since Elon Musk bought the microblogging site, he has been pushing for increased activity and impressions on Twitter. To accelerate the process, he also introduced the ‘View Count’ feature in December 2022. With the feature, people could see the statistics of how a tweet has performed. But, more than a community good, the feature seems to have benefitted the businessman.
After the Super Bowl, the engineers pulled their sleeves up and started to inspect why Musk’s tweets are not getting enough engagement. As per The Verge’s report, Twitter boosts a tweet on the ‘For You’ feed when its engagement is promising from both followers and non-followers.
However, after Musk’s Twitter takeover, users blocked or limited his tweets on their feeds. Now, the Twitter team has artificially boosted his tweets by 1,000 factor— a parameter to ensure that his tweet will rank the highest in the ‘For You’ feed. The technical term for it is “power user multiplier” which only applies to Elon Musk’s tweets.
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