Jin Lei from the Cave Fei Temple Qubit | Official account QbitAI
Musk "locked" Twitter and personally went down to do the test:
By tomorrow morning, I will set my account to "confidentiality".
(I'll see) whether the number of views of private tweets sent out in this way is higher than that of public tweets.
But in the end, Musk's high-profile move is to test a feature of Twitter.
This has attracted the cynicism of many netizens:
It's hilarious, in a company that he spent $44 billion to buy, like a middle school student trying to figure out how the company's algorithms work.
Are all the engineers who understand this laid off?
So what kind of function is this that allows Musk, the CEO, to do it so personally?
Push the state of secrecy, but see more people
Let's take a look at Twitter's confidential status function first.
In the "Security & Privacy" section of your personal account settings, you will find an option called "Audiences and circles".
If you check "Protect your Tweets", your Twitter account will be confidential:
Once selected, only people who follow you will be able to see your Tweets and other account information.
Make a point – only those who follow you can see it.
Logically, this is like sending messages on Weibo and in the circle of friends, there should be less attention and browsing.
But this is not the case.
A netizen did a test curiously:
He found that his tweets sent in a state of secrecy were more viewed and followed:
The impact has reached 5 times the original!
And in this test, the interval between the two tweets was only 5 minutes.
Then after further observation, the little brother came to another conclusion, the people he followed only appeared on the homepage after he set the account to confidentiality.
Coincidentally, many netizens are also expressing similar views:
I made my account private because that's the only way people can see your messages.
This is the Twitter function that Musk will personally test.
However, under his confidential status tweet, the comments of netizens can be described as full of ridicule:
With 9 million views in 5 hours, this tweet is afraid to break the page view record.
Of course, another point that netizens ridiculed was to see Musk now personally test, remembering his drastic layoffs since last year...
Musk dislikes "locking" accounts
However, Musk should be the type of person who dislikes keeping accounts secret the most.
Before that, he had made a statement:
I bought Twitter to promote free speech and to start more conversations on Twitter's "town square." And it's also about spreading diverse perspectives.
To see if Musk has achieved this goal, a foreign article specifically analyzed his more than 20,000 tweets over the past five years.
The analysis found that Musk focused primarily on accounts operated by men and organizations associated with his own business; He increasingly devotes his time to responding to followers who @ him directly on Twitter.
And the analysis also believes that Musk has 128 million followers, and even his deleted tweets will be widely viewed on the platform; but through this experiment, Musk is clearly questioning whether his platform limits the number of views of his own tweets.
In another article analysis, it is believed that although Musk personally tested it seems to attach importance to Twitter's problems, at the same time, Twitter has now entered a critical period -
Promised Twitter to comply with the strict social media regulations of the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) in the coming months.
Musk also tweeted about this before setting his account confidential:
The EU's goals for transparency, accountability and accuracy of information are aligned with Twitter's goals.
However, the article also analyzes and points out:
EU officials remain concerned that Twitter's massive layoffs have affected its engineering, trust and safety teams; That could make it harder for Twitter to quickly comply with the EU's demands.
Musk's apparent inability to negotiate with Twitter engineers about user-raised bugs suggests that the EU's concerns may be justified.
As for whether Musk can give a satisfactory answer to the questions raised by this user, it depends on his own test results.
Reference Links:
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1620664851663319042
[2] https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1620550931514527747
[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/musk-goes-private-on-twitter-to-test-if-locked-tweets-get-more-views/?comments=1&comments-page=1