Elon Musk has been on a quest to prove that he has the thinnest skin on earth. And while the competition is fierce—think Donald Trump—this may have done it. Musk was already upset about his recent tweets not getting enough attention, to the point of having fired an engineer who explained to him that there was simply less interest in his tweets than there had been in the past. And then—and then—his Super Bowl tweet didn’t do as well as President Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet. I mean, can you even believe it? Elon Musk sure couldn’t!
That was it. He was done messing around. Musk’s tweets were not going to be outperformed by the president of the United States of America’s tweets. Musk’s cousin, James Musk, sent a 2:36 AM Slack message to the company’s remaining engineers, Platformer reports.
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“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote nepotism-hire Musk. “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.”
Literally this “high urgency” 2:36 AM “debugging” issue that was happening “across the platform” was that Elon’s “Go Eagles!!!” tweet—which he subsequently deleted—only got 9.1 million impressions, while the president’s tweet got nearly 29 million impressions.
Twitter engineers got to work on fixing the so-called problem, which, to be fair, may have had some basis in reality, Platformer reports: “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.” Although note that that is “some engineers” who work for a guy who fires people when they tell him uncomfortable things, and that either way, they were addressing a temper tantrum over a “Go Eagles” tweet only being seen by 9 million people.
In any case, the answer they arrived at was an algorithm that “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,” Platformer reports. Additionally, the new code “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.’”
How thin is that skin? How raging is that ego?
The results of the manipulation got so extreme and drew so much attention that Musk coyly acknowledged it in a couple of tweets, one using a meme of one woman forcing another to drink milk, with “Elon’s tweets” being forced on “Twitter,” and another saying, “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh … ‘algorithm.’” The artificial boosting was ultimately dialed back a little. It’s still there, just not to a factor of 1,000. Elon Musk has made sure that his $44 billion toy will always make him look like a winner. Musk tweeting out right-wing memes and cliched divorced guy content and SpaceX videos is stuff people are just required to care about.
That brings us to one thing we need to talk about in this whole thing: Biden’s Super Bowl tweet was better. Oh, Musk dressed his “Go Eagles!!!” up with a few American flag emojis, but that was it. Here’s Biden’s:
Musk’s temper tantrum around which an entire company had to pivot in the middle of the night was because his extremely generic “Go Eagles” tweet didn’t get as much attention as the president of the United States being kind of funny and very adorable about how much he loves his wife. The man could not bear to be outperformed by superior content.
Musk using his ownership of Twitter to feed his own ego is pathetic. The fact that he’s doing it as he gives reason to believe he is giving preferential treatment not just to his own right-wing tweets but to the far right in general is more disturbing. Like it or not, Twitter is a major social media platform, a way people exchange information and ideas. It had a right-wing bias before Musk took over, and then he took over proclaiming that a (nonexistent) left-wing bias needed to be corrected. This kind of thing has real-world effects.
Unfortunately, in a world where Musk’s billions of dollars give him the unquestioned right to insist that his voice be elevated above literally everyone else’s, the main tool we have to knock him down a little bit is mockery. So, everyone, please, point and laugh. Because this guy is truly pathetic.
President Biden's State of the Union was a masterclass in politics. The Republican Party, like a headless hydra, is unable to find a meaningful policy to get behind. Markos and Kerry talk about the highlights of last week and the enjoyment of watching Senate and House conservatives snipe at one another.
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