Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Algorithmic Curtain.

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NoRealPowerVille

If you watched the Super Bowl on the TeeVee last weekend, whether for the game, the halftime show, or the commercials, you likely saw Mr. Musk thumbing his nose at all the libs who buy his cars as he sat with Rupert Murdoch in a superbox high above the Arizona desert.

What you may not have noticed was the fact that Mr. Musk was also busy on his phone engaging the twittmachine.

Next came the 'analytics' from Mr. Musk's own company which indicated that Mr. Musk's tweets got considerably less attention than those of US'ian president Joe Biden.

Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton, writing on their tech-focused substack 'Platformer', explain what happened next:

...Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.

Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base...

So.

What did Mr. Musk's minions do at his behest?

Well...

...By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now 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.

Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also 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.”

That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate...

In other words, the man behind the curtain is now faking literally everything, analytics-wise, via algorithm fixing.

Meanwhile, the wily old coyote....errrr...Mr. Biden just keeps on keeping' on when it comes to taking the highroad.

On Mr. Musk's very own network:

Imagine that!


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