Feeling ignored on Super Bowl, Musk forced algorithm change to boost his tweets

SAN FRANCISCO – Billionaire Elon Musk had Twitter engineers working late on Sunday (Feb 12) to alter his social network's algorithm and prioritise his tweets, resulting in a glut of them in users' feeds on Monday, according to a report by Platformer.

Mr Musk was said to be unhappy with the number of views of his Super Bowl tweets.

As a result of his request, Twitter excluded Mr Musk's tweets from filters designed to improve the quality of users' timelines, Platformer said, and artificially boosted them by a factor of 1,000.

Users across Twitter, which Mr Musk acquired for US$44 billion (S$58 billion) in October, complained about seeing an abundance of the owner's missives on the day following the Super Bowl.

Mr Musk's message of support for the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday got significantly lower engagement than United States President Joe Biden expressing a similar sentiment.

Mr Musk has been increasingly focused on – and frustrated by – his personal engagement numbers, which have been dropping in recent weeks, the report said.

He has nearly 129 million followers, whereas Mr Biden's account has 37 million.

Before taking Twitter private, Mr Musk, who also owns carmaker Tesla, spoke of his desire to make it an even playing field and eliminate bias in the system.

Mr Musk tweeted liberally about Twitter and its functionality after the publication of the report, but did not address its content.

Earlier, he tweeted a meme suggesting his tweets were going to be force-fed to Twitter users. He also said the company was making adjustments to the algorithm.

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