Engineers Gave Elon’s Tweets Special Treatment Because Elon Freaked Out That A Joe Biden Tweet Got More Engagement (original) (raw)

from the catering-to-the-bossman's-ego dept

What’s the opposite of shadowbanning? Maxboosting? I dunno, but whatever it is, that’s what Twitter’s frustrated and exhausted engineers gave Elon Musk after he whined (for not the first time) that people might like someone more than they like Elon. By now you know the basics: last week it was reported that Elon was getting frustrated that the views on his tweets were dropping, and he apparently fired an engineer who suggested that maybe, just maybe, Elon wasn’t quite so popular any more. Then, on Monday, suddenly lots of people found that their “For You” algorithmic feed (something Musk insisted was evil before he took over, but now is pressuring people to use) basically was just The Elon Musk show, with every tweet being something from Elon.

Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton are back with the inside scoop on what happened. Basically, it sounds like Elon threw yet another tantrum, this time because a Joe Biden Super Bowl tweet got more engagement than an Elon Musk tweet. So, in the middle of the night after the Super Bowl, Mr. Nepotism had his cousin send a message to everyone at Twitter, saying this was a “high urgency” issue.

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Of course, for any person who can understand basic things like “what people like” you can kinda see why Biden’s tweet about the Super Bowl got more attention than Musk’s. Biden posted a sweet message noting that while he wasn’t taking sides, he had to root for the Eagles because Jill Biden apparently is a huge Eagles fan. It’s a cute tweet.

Musk’s tweet, on the other hand, was just straight up “Go @Eagles” with a bunch of American flags, and there was little reason to interact with it.

And, I mean, even funnier is that after the Eagles lost (despite leading for much of the game) Musk… deleted his tweet. Like a true fan. Hardcore.

Still, most normal human beings would recognize that one of those tweets is endearing, and one is just “Look at me, I am embracing your sports team. Love me.” So, it’s not really a surprise that one got more engagement than the other. It wasn’t “the algorithm.” It wasn’t even who is popular and who is not. One is just clearly a more engagement-worthy tweet.

But Musk’s always hungry ego must be sated, so his cousin sent out the “high urgency” issue, and Musk allegedly threatened to fire his remaining engineers if they didn’t solve the problem of his tweets not getting enough engagement:

Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.

[….]

His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.

Musk told them directly that making his tweets popular again was the top priority project. This is entering mad king territory:

Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.

The solution, basically hard code into the system that every tweet that Elon Musk ever sends must be considered crazy popular by the algorithm, to a level that it must mean that everyone wants to see it, and therefore everyone will:

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.”

For a guy who insisted he was going to “open source” the Twitter algorithm to stop it from artificially promoting one story over another, he’s literally done the opposite. All because he can’t admit that maybe someone else’s tweet was better than his? What a pathetic insecure little brat.

There’s a lot more in the Platformer/Verge piece, but the closing quote from an engineer working on this is the most telling by far:

Terrified of losing their jobs, this is the system that Twitter engineers are now building.

“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.”

Elon is, of course, free to do whatever nonsense he wants with the site. He owns it. But people need to realize that he’s been incredibly hypocritical and gone back on nearly every single promise he’s made in running the site, and each time he goes back on a promise, rather than going back in a manner to benefit all users, he only goes back such that it benefits him, and him alone.

Of course, to give credit where credit is due, Matt Levine totally called this back when Elon first bought his original 9% stake in Twitter. Levine predicted how the first meeting with then CEO Parag Agarwal and Musk (as his largest shareholder) would go:

Twitter’s relatively new chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal: Welcome, Mr. Musk. We’re so glad that you are our biggest shareholder. We have prepared a presentation showing how we are executing on our strategy of being more technically nimble, building new products and growing revenue and active users. Here on slide 1 you can see—

Elon Musk: Make the font bigger when I tweet.

Agrawal: What?

Musk: I am your biggest shareholder, I want the font on my tweets to be bigger than the font on everyone else’s tweets.

Agrawal: That’s not really how we—

Musk: And I want 290 characters. Again, just for me.

Agrawal: …

Musk: And it should play a little sound when I tweet so everyone knows.

Agrawal: I just feel like we want to make a good product for all of our millions of users? I feel like that is going to improve profitability in the long run and, as our largest shareholder, you in particular stand to benefit from—

Musk: Oh I don’t care even a little bit about that, if your stock doubles that is rounding error on my net worth, I just love tweeting and want to meddle a bit to optimize it for my personal needs.

I honestly didn’t think Musk could possibly be that vain and that petty. But I guess I was wrong.

Filed Under: algorithm, elon musk, engagement, for you, joe biden, tweets
Companies: twitter