[imagesource: James Duncan Davidson / Copyright: CC BY-NC 3.0]

Elon Musk and Donald Trump have a lot in common.

They’re both overgrown boys vying for everyone’s love and attention and are willing to do absurd things to ensure it happens.

The only difference between them is that Elon bought an already well-established popular social media platform and manipulated the algorithm so that only his voice was heard, whereas Donald tried to create his own one from scratch to spread his bigotry to the masses.

Choose your fighter, I guess.

The big news now is that the Twitter CEO threw a total tantrum last week after he realised that some of his tweets weren’t getting enough views and assembled his engineers to work on the pressing problem.

Gizmodo reports that this obsession began when the CEO decided to make his account private to see whether that affected his view:

The following week, he called a meeting of Twitter’s advisors and engineers to ask why his account, which has nearly 130 million followers, was getting so little views.

“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, as reported by the Platformer newsletter. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Musk was also so irritated that his tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s:

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

Then, he went on a mission, threatening to fire any remaining engineers if they did not build a system designed to ensure that only his tweets would get special treatment, The Verge noted.

In fact, he did fire one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined in general:

“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.”

Is it just me or is it starting to feel like he’s running a dictatorship company?

If you were on Twitter on Monday, you may have seen way more from Musk than usual because the engineers worked day in and day out to figure out the issue:

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.

Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core ranked feed, now known as “For You.

The CEO even brazenly acknowledged this Musk-bombing in a tweet:

pic.twitter.com/iZUukCVrl5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023

He then suggested that some of the new changes would be walked back ever so slightly:

Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023

Thanks, Musk, we don’t know what we would do without you.

[source:verge&gizmodo]