Elon Musk tweeted his support for the Philadelphia Eagles during the first quarter of the Super Bowl on Sunday.
“Go, Eagles!” Musk tweeted, surrounded by an American flag emoji.
Musk’s tweet was suddenly deleted sometime after the Kansas City Chiefs won. The following day, as Mashable previously reported, Twitter users began reporting that their “For You” feeds on the platform were nearly entirely filled with tweets and replies from Elon Musk.
These two events turned out to be related.
Musk deleted his Super Bowl tweet and demanded that Twitter engineers boost his content in users’ feeds after seeing that President Joe Biden’s tweet(Opens in a new tab) supporting the Eagles received more views than his.
As your president, I’m not picking favorites.
But as Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly. https://t.co/YtgaEC83Qj
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 13, 2023
As of Tuesday night, Biden’s tweet had received 29 million impressions. Prior to Musk’s deletion of his tweet on Sunday, it had 9.1 million impressions.
According to the Platformer report, people familiar with the situation said Musk’s cousin, James, sent an internal message on Slack to Twitter’s engineers at 2:26 AM on Monday morning regarding a “high urgency” situation. The emergency was that Biden’s post outperformed Musk’s. Around 80 Twitter engineers were hired to work on the problem.
By Monday afternoon, a fix to the algorithm had been implemented, allowing Musk’s tweets – and only Musk’s tweets – to “bypass Twitter’s filters,” which “artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000,” promoting Musk’s content in everyone’s feed.
On Monday night, as users began complaining about seeing nothing but Musk, Twitter’s owner appeared to publicly acknowledge the issue with a tweet announcing(Opens in a new tab) “adjustments” to the algorithm.
However, Musk appears to have left out the part where the Musk-filled Twitter feeds were caused by his alleged jealousy over Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet outperforming his. It’s an especially interesting sequence of events in light of Musk’s attempts to portray Twitter prior to his acquisition as a biased institution via the Twitter Files.
“[Musk] bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” one Twitter employee told Platformer in their report.
That appears to be a fairly concise way of summarizing the situation. It also perfectly fits within Twitter’s character limit.
