Yes, Elon Musk told his engineers to reconfigure Twitter's "For You" feed algorithm to basically include all of billionaire owner Elon Musk's tweets, because it's his $44 billion toy and there's nothing you can do about it, you loser who doesn't have $44 billion.
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.
One possibility, engineers said, was that Musk’s reach might have been reduced because he’d been blocked and muted by so many people in recent months. Even before the events of this weekend, Musk’s long stint as Twitter’s main character, both in the run-up to and aftermath of his $44 billion takeover of the company, had led huge numbers of people to filter him out of their feeds.
But there were also legitimate technical reasons the CEO’s tweets weren’t performing. Twitter’s system has historically promoted tweets from users whose posts perform better to both followers and non-followers in the For You Tab; Musk’s tweets should have fit that model but showed up less only about half the time that some engineers thought they should, according to some internal estimates.
By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets 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.”
That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.
Musk acknowledged his bombardment of the timeline on Tuesday afternoon, posting a version of the popular “forced to drink milk” meme in which one woman labeled “Elon’s tweets” forcibly bottle-feeds another woman labeled “Twitter” while pulling her hair back.
Joshua, the AI in "WarGames", was right all along some 40 years ago.
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