Well! Now we know why Elon Musk suddenly decided that every Twitter user needs to see every tweet he writes. Musk is jealous of President Biden's social media team getting an order of magnitude more engagement than his lackluster attempts at football fannery! More interesting is that he had his cousin light a fire under the surviving engineering team at Twitter, at 2:30am begging for SOME method to make Elon's tweet appear more popular.
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.'"
