Twitter chief executive Elon Musk rallied a team of roughly 80 engineers to reconfigure the platform’s algorithm so his tweets would be more widely viewed, tech news site Platformer has reported.
A disgruntled Musk called for an emergency effort after a tweet he sent during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from Joe Biden, interviews and internal documents reviewed by Platformer have revealed.
The effort was sparked when a tweet from the president, who has 37m followers, generated nearly 29m impressions while a similar tweet from Musk – who has 128m followers – generated little more than 9.1m impressions.
A Twitter employee and cousin of Elon Musk, James Musk, posted urgently in the company Slack at 2.30am the following Monday morning, asking all employees who can code to participate. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem,” he wrote. “This is high urgency.”
Engineers then deployed a new algorithm that artificially inflated Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9m followers see them. Many who do not follow Musk are also being served his tweets in their feed through the “For you” tab of the app’s home page, which curates tweets from a number of accounts, including those a user is not following.
Musk seemed to publicly confirm the move, in his own way, posting a meme about forcing followers to read his tweets. He also told followers to “stay tuned” while Twitter makes adjustments to the algorithm.
The decision to devote internal resources to promoting his own tweets comes amid ongoing reports about Musk’s obsession with his own impressions on the platform. Last week, a report from Platformer also revealed Musk had fired a principal engineer at Twitter who told him views on his tweets had decreased organically, with interest in the erratic CEO waning. Users have complained since Twitter made its “For you” page the default feed on the platform in January that Musk’s tweets were appearing more frequently.
Musk, who purchased Twitter in October 2022 for $44bn, has made a number of additional changes to the platform in the intervening months, allowing the return of previously banned accounts like that of Donald Trump, changing the process for Twitter verification, and revoking free access to the platform’s API, or application programming interface.
Amid ongoing criticisms of his decisions as chief executive, Musk has promised to step down and find a replacement as soon as later this year. Current employees have described a harrowing environment at the company, which laid off nearly half its workforce in November 2022. At the time, Musk defended the cuts and other cost-cutting measures, stating the company was losing $4m per day.