On Super Bowl Sunday, in the first quarter of the game, Elon Musk tweeted his support for the Philadelphia Eagles.
“Go @Eagles!!!” Musk tweeted, enclosing his words in an American flag emoji.
Musk’s tweet was abruptly deleted after the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory.The next day, formerly he as Mashable reportTwitter users suddenly began reporting that their “For You” feeds on the platform were almost completely filled with tweets and replies from Elon Musk.
Elon Musk deleted the tweet after the Eagles lost the Super Bowl.
Credit: Mashable screenshot
It turns out that these two things are related.
According to a new report from platformer(opens in new tab)Musk Deleted His Super Bowl Tweets And President Joe Biden’s Tweet(opens in new tab) Supporting the Eagles received more views than he did.
Tweet may have been deleted
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Biden’s tweet had garnered 29 million impressions as of Tuesday night. By comparison, before Musk deleted the tweet on Sunday, it had 9.1 million impressions.
The platformer reports that people familiar with the situation told the outlet that Musk’s cousin James sent an internal Slack message to Twitter’s engineers about the “extremely urgent” situation at 2:26 a.m. Monday. The urgency was that Biden’s post was better than Musk’s. About 80 of his Twitter engineers were mobilized to tackle the issue.
By Monday afternoon, a fix had been implemented in the algorithm to allow only Mr. Musk’s tweets to “bypass Twitter’s filters,” “artificially boost Mr. Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000,” and feed everyone. now promotes Mr. Musk’s content.
The Twitter owner apparently publicly acknowledged the problem in a tweet, as users began to complain that they could only see masks on Monday night. announcement(opens in new tab) A “tweak” has been added to the algorithm.
But what Musk clearly left out was the part where his jealousy of Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweets outweighed his own, and thus had a Twitter feed full of masks. It’s a particularly interesting sequence of events in the context of Musk’s attempt to paint Twitter before he acquired it as a biased institution. twitter file.
As one Twitter employee told the platform in a report,[Musk] Acquiring the company, showing off what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, and manipulating the platform to force all users to hear only his voice. ”
This seems like a pretty concise way of breaking this whole thing down. It also fits perfectly within Twitter’s character limit.
