Elon Musk has come up with a way so you have to see his tweets first
Topics: Elon Musk, Twitter, Technology, Social Media
Rhiannon Ingle
Featured Image Credit: UPI / Alamy Stock Photo / @elonmusk/Twitter
Topics: Elon Musk, Twitter, Technology, Social Media
Ever wished your tweets got just that little bit more of an audience to rake in those likes and retweets?
Well, Elon Musk has apparently done exactly that.
The business tycoon has reportedly engineered a way for his tweets to be the first to come up on your Twitter timeline.
Yes, you heard that right, Elon Musk has made the bold stance in amplifying his tweets after receiving some pretty low numbers following the Super Bowl.
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Musk, who boasts a hefty 128.9 million follower count on the platform, first took on the title of owner and CEO of Twitter back in October of last year.
Since then, the multi-billionaire, who has continuously used polls as his main go-to decision maker, has made some very interesting changes to the social media algorithm.
From reinstating the profiles of previously banned users like Kanye West, Donald Trump and Andrew Tate to the introduction of the new Twitter Blue subscription service - Musk has definitely not been shy in switching things up.
The whole ordeal began when President Biden - who has just a fraction of the followers Musk has - gained huge numbers in his tweets about the Super Bowl.
Biden, with just 29.5 million followers, wracked up an impressive 29 million impressions compared to Musk's measly 9.1 million before he quickly deleted the flopped tweet, Platformer reported.
So when Twitter users open the app expecting to see their usual dashboard of tweets, they instead found their timeline completely plastered with Musk's posts.
Platformer claimed the engineers built an entire new system designed to ensure that the CEO's tweets would be promoted all across the user base.
A reported 80 people worked on the system, which became the top priority at the company, as they all hypothesised as to why Musk was losing so much traction.
Theories included that the billionaire had apparently been blocked and muted by many users so his tweets weren't showing up, alongside that interest in Musk had just simply just declined in general.
However, by Monday afternoon (13 February), the 'problem' had been 'fixed'.
Engineers allegedly deployed code to automatically 'greenlight' all of Musk's posts - bypassing Twitter's filters that are designed to show users the best content possibly, Platformer says.
This brand-new algorithm 'artificially boosted' Musk's tweets by a massive factor of 1,000 - meaning that his tweets, and his tweets alone, would rank higher than any other user's in the feed.
Acknowledging the change, Musk took to the platform yesterday (14 February) to share a popular meme template of a woman, labelled 'Elon's tweets', force-feeding another woman, labelled 'Twitter', a bottle of milk.
And it received a whopping 141.5 million impressions.
Musk also shared with his followers that he and his team were making 'adjustments' to the new feature.
He tweeted: "Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… 'algorithm'."
UNILAD has reached out to Twitter for comment.