Elon Musk's tweets invading your Twitter feed wasn't exactly by accident

The drama around Elon Musk's Twitter engagement has just unfolded a new layer. Many Twitter users, followers and non-followers alike, were welcomed by Musk's tweets in the For You tab earlier this week. Now, a report by Platformer reveals that the tweet flood was rather collateral damage than a glitch that was assumed initially.

As per the report, a team of around eighty Twitter engineers was assembled and its task was to figure out the reason behind the CEO's decreasing Twitter reach. One possible reason given was that many users might have blocked or muted Musk in recent months. He has been in the limelight ever since the $44 billion takeover became the talk of the town.

However, another reason given by the team was that Twitter's system observes how a user's tweets perform in the For You tab for both followers and non-followers. And Musk's tweets appeared around half the time than the engineers thought they should.

Some code changes were implemented to artificially boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000. The code changes (internally known as "power user multiplier") also allowed his tweets to dodge Twitter's filters responsible for showing users the best content possible and filters that stopped a single account from flooding the For You feed.

It's no doubt that the consequences of the code tweaks attracted criticism on the microblogging site. Musk had to show up for damage control with an acknowledgment and the 'forced to drink milk' pornographic meme.

Platformer has learned that the artificial boost is still in place although its factor has been toned down to less than 1,000. A couple of tweets Musk made on Tuesday attracted around 50 million views. An internal estimate shows his tweets appear in front of around 90% of his followers.

But still, a significant fluctuation is present for the CEO's account which had close to 129 million followers at the time of writing. The reach could be around 8 million for some tweets and can even shoot up to 135 million or higher for the more "popular" ones.

Source: Platformer