Since Tuesday, February 14, millions of Twitter users have seen the tweets of Elon Musk, the kingpin of the platform, appear massively. And rightly so, the latter threatened the engineers with taking the door if they did not drastically increase the popularity of their messages, explains the American site The Verge. Result: Twitter teams tweaked the platform’s algorithm to create custom computer code for the boss.
Musk furious after Joe Biden’s tweet
At the source of this anger, a tweet from US President Joe Biden, published on the occasion of the Super Bowl final, this Sunday, February 12 (US time). According to figures released by Twitter, the post has been viewed 29 million times, compared to just 9 million times for Elon Musk’s tweet on the same subject. Furious at this discrepancy, Musk later deleted his tweet and urgently summoned his team overnight from Sunday to Monday, with one requirement: become the most popular account on the platform.
As The Verge explains, 80 people worked hard to come up with a very special treatment for him and propel his tweets into the news feeds of millions of people, whether they follow him or not. A few days earlier, Elon Musk had already fired an engineer, citing the possibility that the drop in audience for his tweets could be linked to a simple lack of interest in his person.
As a reminder, the Twitter feed is by default based on algorithmic selection (which can be turned off), showing messages from accounts the user is subscribed to, but also a selection of tweets posted by accounts they don’t follow.
right pass
To select the messages to be disseminated, the algorithm is based on the reactions of the first Internet users who see a message appear, depending on whether they open the tweet, react or continue. It is from an estimate of the potential popularity of a message that the system will choose to amplify it or not.
As The Verge points out, Twitter engineers have modified the algorithm code to create a specific privilege for Elon Musk, so that all the messages he publishes are disseminated massively among his subscribers, like among the rest. While for a normal account, the algorithmic selection only shows his tweets in a small fraction of subscribers, those of Elon Musk appeared in 90% of the accounts that follow him, say sources from the US media.
A preferential treatment to which the head of the platform alluded, in humorous messages. On February 14, he posted a message for the less enigmatic, suggesting that Twitter’s algorithm be tweaked so that his tweets would appear less systematically.
Source: BFM TV
