Elon Musk's tweets will now be in almost everyone's Twitter feed – the social network engineers created the appropriate system specifically for him. Musk demanded to bypass the algorithms to increase the issuance of his publications after his Super Bowl tweet received fewer likes than US President Joe Biden's tweet.
Biden wrote that he would support his wife, who is a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles team, and collected almost 29 million views. Musk, who also endorsed the Eagles in a tweet, garnered just over 9.1 million views before deleting the tweet.
Immediately after that, Musk, under the threat of layoffs, demanded that the engineers solve the issue – create a system thanks to which his tweets will have a greater user reach. It is reported by Platformer with reference to informed sources and documents submitted to the publication. The Twitter system has historically promoted the tweets of users whose posts were the best among both followers and non-followers in the "For You" tab, the algorithm shows the user the most popular content.
About 80 people were involved in the project, which quickly became the company's number one priority. Employees have been exploring various hypotheses for why Musk's tweets aren't reaching as many people as he thought, and testing possible solutions. One possibility was that Musk's audience reach could have dwindled due to the businessman's massive user block, the engineers said. Even before the tweet situation, Musk had been a Twitter protagonist for a long time, both leading up to and after his $44 billion acquisition of the company, which led to a huge number of people filtering him out of their feed.
Already on February 13, on Monday, the “problem” was “fixed”. Twitter rolled out the code and all of Musk's tweets were automatically greenlit, meaning his posts would bypass Twitter's filters designed to show people better content. The algorithm now artificially boosts Musk's tweets by 1,000x, a constant rate that ensures his tweets rank higher than anyone else in the feed.
Internally, this is called the "User Multiplier," although it only applies to Elon Musk. The code also allows Musk's account to bypass Twitter algorithms that would prevent a single account from flooding the main ranked feed, known as "For You."