Focus:
- 1 Musk's tweets about the Super Bowl received fewer views than Biden's. Musk returned to the company overnight on a private jet and asked the team for answers.
- 2 employees worked through the night to investigate why Musk's tweets did not live up to his expectations and to test possible solutions. Engineers eventually built a system designed to ensure that Musk benefited from a tweet promotion mechanism that had never existed before.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk
Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently asked engineers to take steps to prioritize his tweets on followers' pages.
According to interviews with people familiar with the matter and documents obtained by tech media Platformer, after Musk's tweets about the Super Bowl were less effective than those of US President Joe Biden, he ordered major changes to the algorithm to give his tweets greater exposure.
In the past two days, according to the observations of multiple media and the reactions of global netizens, users' Twitter timelines have been "flooded" by Musk's tweets. On the 14th, Musk himself admitted this move.
A chief engineer was fired
According to sources, at 2:36 a.m. on February 13, Musk's relative James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
"We're debugging cross-platform engagement." James Musk wrote that he marked "@here" in the work collaboration software Slack to ensure that anyone online could see it. "Anyone who can make dashboards and write software can help with that. This is very urgent. If you would like to help, please like this article. ”
The nature of the emergency became clear when the engineers logged into their laptops: Musk's tweets about the Super Bowl received fewer views than Biden's. Biden's tweet, which generated nearly 29 million views, said he would support his wife in supporting the Philadelphia Eagles. Musk also tweeted his support for the Hawks, garnering a little over 9.1 million views before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
On the evening of the 12th, Musk returned to the Bay Area by private plane and asked his team for an answer. Within a day, the incident reverberated around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find Musk's posts filling their timelines. This is no coincidence: After Musk threatened to fire the remaining engineers, engineers set up a system designed to ensure that Musk benefited from a tweet promotion mechanism that had never existed before.
Last week, Platformer also broke the news that Musk fired one of the company's two remaining principal engineers after the engineer told him that views of his tweets were declining, in part because interest in Musk in general had declined. Musk's deputy told the rest of the engineering team over the weekend that they too would lose their jobs if they didn't "fix" the engagement problem.
Raised one parameter of Musk's tweet by 1,000 times
Late on the night of the 12th, Musk personally addressed his team. About 80 people were pulled into the project, which quickly became the company's top priority. Employees worked through the night to investigate why Musk's tweets didn't reach as many people he thought they should reach and test possible solutions.
One possibility, engineers say, is that Musk's influence has diminished because he has been blocked and silenced by a lot of people in recent months. Even before last weekend's events, Musk's long work as a Twitter protagonist, both before and after his $44 billion acquisition, had led to massive numbers of people filtering him out of their feed.
But there are also legitimate technical reasons why Musk's tweet didn't work. Twitter's system has historically promoted tweets from users with better data performance to followers and non-followers on the For You page. According to some internal assessments, Musk's tweets should fit that model, but the exposure is only about half what some engineers think.
By the afternoon of the 13th, the "problem" had been "solved". Twitter deploys code to automatically "green light" all of Musk's tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter's filters to show people the best content. The algorithm now artificially boosts one parameter of Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000, a constant number that ensures his tweets rank higher than anyone else.
Internally, this is known as the "power user multiplier," although it only applies to Musk, people familiar with the matter said. The code also allowed Musk's account to bypass Twitter's heuristics, which would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core content stream, now known as the "For You" page.
This explains why many users opened the app on the 13th and found that Musk dominated the information flow, with a dozen or more Musk's tweets and replies, visible to everyone who followed him and millions of people who did not.
Musk himself admitted
On the afternoon of the 14th, Musk admitted his "bombing" of the timeline, posting a popular version of the "forced to drink milk" meme, in which a woman marked "Elon's tweet" forcibly fed another woman marked "Twitter" with a milk bottle while pulling her hair back.
Musk tweeted in response to his bombardment of users' timelines with a meme
Some of Musk's tweets on the 13th were sent while he was on the phone with engineers to test whether the solution they designed worked as well as he thought it would.
After the uproar, Musk seemed to hint that the changes would be at least partially pullback. "In our adjustment uh... 'Algorithm', stay tuned. He tweeted.
Although the above parameters have now been adjusted below 1,000, the artificial means of improvement applied to Musk's account remain. Several tweets released by Musk on the 14th have about 43 million views, higher than the recent average.
"He bought the company, focused on what he thought was disrupted and manipulated under the previous management, and then turned around and manipulated the platform, forcing all users to participate and only hear his voice." One Twitter employee complained, "I don't think we've lost faith that he really wants to do what's good for here." ”