Platformer has interviewed Twitter employees to figure out why people's For You feeds turned into The Elon Musk show, and they said the company's engineers truly did build a system that benefited their CEO alone. According to the publication, Elon's cousin and Twitter employee James Musk sent an urgent message on the company's Slack on Monday morning. "We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform," he wrote, calling the situation "high urgency" and asking everyone who can write code to help. The situation? President Biden's tweet about rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles got more engagement than Musk's.
Apparently, the president's tweet generated almost 29 million impressions, whereas Musk's generated 9.1 million only before he deleted it. Musk's issue with his tweets not getting as much engagement as he would like started before the Super Bowl, however. Platformer previously reported that he fired one of Twitter's two remaining principal engineers because he…
2023-02-15 00:36:02
Link from www.engadget.com
Recently, Twitter has come under fire for allegedly developing a technology that increases engagement on tweets from famous people such as Elon Musk. According to reports, Twitter has created a system that will alert other users when Elon Musk posts a new tweet and then send reminders to those same users if they don’t engage with the tweet. The system is supposedly in place to increase visibility of Musk’s tweets and turn them into conversation starters, due to the sheer volume of content posted to the platform on a daily basis.
The news has raised ethical concerns within the community, as many feel that Twitter is unfairly favoring a select few people on the site and skewing engagement numbers. After all, users of the site have to compete with the likes of Elon Musk, one of the most followed Twitter accounts in the world, making it much harder to get even basic engagement on their content if Twitter’s system is in place.
Unfortunately for Twitter, the media has taken notice and has accused the platform of manipulating its users’ engagement. While Twitter denies any manipulation, and there has yet to be any significant evidence to prove the theory, the platform remains open to accusations from users, observers and the press alike.
Ethical issues and debates aside, the truth is that Twitter is in a difficult position. On the one hand, the platform needs to provide high-quality content to its users in order to remain competitive, but on the other, it can’t be seen to be favoring a single person or group of people over all others. Given the balance that the platform needs to maintain, it remains to be seen how Twitter will handle this particular issue in the near future.
No matter the outcome, one thing is clear: Twitter’s development of a system to increase engagement on certain tweets has been met with criticism and warranted concern over the manipulation of user engagement on the platform.
