On Wednesday morning, Twitter CEO Elon Musk suspended his Twitter account, telling users to “Made my account private until tomorrow morning to see if you see my private tweets more often than my public ones.”
Since then, Musk has been ridiculed by Twitter users for apparently not knowing how the platform works, or at least not having Twitter engineers to explain it to him. One account with nearly 70,000 followers joked that Musk needed to run “a schoolboy’s idea of an experiment to figure out how the company’s algorithm works because he fired anyone who could explain it to him.”Back in November, Musk had to start hiring engineers after mass layoffs, and Twitter’s workplace benefits change saw many engineers leave Twitter, seemingly threatening to destabilize the platform and cause disruptions.
really funny he spent $44 billion on a company but he still needs to do a middle schooler experiment to figure out how the company’s algorithm works because he fired anyone who could explain it to him pic.twitter.com/ LhcQSVerfx
Musk will apparently spend the rest of today testing this experiment, apparently in response to conservative users like LibsofTikTok and Ben Shapiro, who have reported running their own tests to prove that banned accounts generate more views. than public accounts.
So far, the CEO of Twitter, who says he bought the platform to promote free speech, eliminate echo chambers and open up more conversations in Twitter’s “town square”, would probably be the last person Twitter users would expect to have their account banned. record. Musk is very active on the platform, and his usually public tweets seem to reach audiences outside of his own audience.
Yesterday, a New York Times report analyzed 20,000 of Musk’s tweets over the past five years to assess how Musk is using the platform and whether Musk is achieving his stated goal of spreading diverse viewpoints on the platform.
This analysis showed that Musk mainly follows the accounts of men and organizations associated with his own business, while he posts “all hours of the day, most days of the week.”Musk is increasingly devoting more time to responding to followers who directly mention him in tweets praising him. With 128 million followers, even Musk’s deleted tweets are widely viewed on the platform, but with this experiment, he appears to be wondering if his platform is restricting views of his own tweets.
In its current form, Twitter’s popularity as a platform is largely due to its almost unparalleled ability to speed up messaging from even the most obscure accounts. Before Musk took over, Twitter was known for launching “protagonists,”with thousands or even millions of users on the platform joining heated discussions about viral tweets. Musk has become the most followed and enduring protagonist on Twitter lately, and his tweets are almost inevitable on the platform.
Before today’s test launch, Musk seemed very confident on Twitter. He recently tried to prove the strength of his platform by adding new public views metrics that show the true reach of tweets. It appears that conservative users have begun using view counting to track whether their tweets have wider reach when created from blocked accounts compared to public accounts, theorizing that their followers are more likely to see their tweets from blocked accounts than from public accounts.
EU plans Twitter ‘stress test’
While Musk is trying to do his own testing of reporting a problem with tweet views, he also appears to have stepped into a pivotal moment by promising that Twitter will comply with the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) strict social media rules in the next few months. reports The Wall Street Journal.
Before Musk had his account suspended, he tweeted that the EU’s “goals of transparency, accountability and accuracy of information align”with those of Twitter, noting that community notes would help enforce the DSA by preventing the spread of disinformation on the platform.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said he will be closely monitoring Twitter’s compliance and will conduct a “stress test”on Twitter in the coming weeks to determine how Twitter currently fails to meet the DSA’s requirements for blocking illegal content. This test could result in possible penalties or restrictions on Twitter if the company does not prioritize timely compliance.
The magazine notes that EU officials remain concerned that Twitter’s massive layoffs, which have affected its engineering and trust and security teams, could make it difficult for the platform to quickly comply with EU directives. Musk’s apparent inability to consult with engineers on user reports of crashes suggests these concerns may be justified.
Twitter could not be contacted for comment, as its communications office is reportedly still closed by Musk, despite his promises to be more transparent about how the platform operates.