Have you noticed that some of your favorite Twitter users have locked their accounts in the last day or two?
Perhaps the most obvious case of a Twitter user who recently went private is none other than the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. Musk, who has more than 127 million followers, didn’t make his tweets private to hide them from the public.
Elon Musk’s Twitter account currently looks like this, unless you’re following him.
Credit: Mashable screenshot
No, Musk locked his account to test if the Twitter algorithm had gone awry. Here’s what’s happening.
Over the past month or so, many Twitter users have noticed a significant change in their Twitter feeds. Shortly after Musk took office, users began to see his For You feed filled with all sorts of random tweets from accounts they didn’t follow or had never interacted with. became. Musk himself acknowledged the issue and attributed it to an algorithm update that fixed it.
However, prominent users, especially those in right-wing circles and Musk’s Twitter orbit, continued to complain that the algorithm change resulted in a significant drop in engagement.
Rumors began circulating that when users locked their accounts, they were seeing more engagement, such as likes and retweets. This essentially makes your tweets private and only shows your current followers. Unpublishing usually prevents users from retweeting your posts, so your account will experience less engagement when it’s private.
On Tuesday, one of Elon Musk’s favorite right-wing Twitter users, Ian Miles Chong, said: report(opens in new window) When he tested this theory himself, he experienced an increase in engagement. Cheong showed two similar tweets and their engagement for five minutes in a row. A tweet sent when Cheong was locked garnered five times as many likes.
This test seems to have officially put the issue on Musk’s radar.
‘Wow, this is very worrying,’ said Musk murmured(opens in new window) Reply to Chong.
By early Wednesday morning, Musk had his Twitter account locked.
Users who didn’t follow Musk were confused as to why he couldn’t see his tweets anymore. Twitter users typically lock their normally public accounts when negative talk or news about them is imminent. Some speculate that it was. But when you have hundreds of millions of followers, going private doesn’t mean you can really hide.
However, Musk sent the tweets and explained that he was testing this theory that there is a quirk in the algorithm that prioritizes tweets from locked accounts.
Elon Musk made his Twitter account private to test engagement on locked accounts.
Credit: Mashable screenshot
“I made my account private until tomorrow morning to test if my private tweets show more than my public tweets,” he said. explained(opens in new window).
Musk’s public test has some oddities.
For one thing, his test sample is clearly for one user, himself. Engagement and reach reach ebbs and flows based on a mix of different issues at any given time. Content may get more engagement based on the time it was posted and what’s happening on the platform that day. A single user’s experience is unlikely to get to the root of the problem.
Another issue is that Musk owns the platform. He has access to his Twitter code and its developers. These developers have the tools to reverse-engineer the issue very well and figure out what changes were made in the past month that caused this issue (one hopes so). Mr. Musk locking his account is unnecessary and melodramatic.
All users, politically left and right, and those who have never tweeted about politics, are complaining about these issues. Regardless of what Musk discovered in testing with his personal account, Twitter’s recommendation algorithm has clearly changed for the worse under his leadership.
