Twitter CEO Elon Musk has presented his ownership of the company as a defense of free speech and democracy. Yet every day it grows clearer that Musk sees Twitter as a personal kingdom over which he wishes to wield absolute power.
According to a report from the Silicon Valley-focused newsletter Platformer, Musk reacted very poorly to what he perceived as a crisis on Super Bowl night: President Joe Biden’s tweets were getting a lot more reach than his own tweets. Musk’s cousin, who works at Twitter, told Twitter engineers that figuring out why Musk’s tweets weren’t as visible as he liked was considered a matter of “high urgency.” Some 80 people were reportedly pulled onto the pressing project.
Musk’s ultra-boosted tweets represent a clear conflict of interest.
By the next day, Musk’s tweets weren’t just more visible; they were flooding everybody’s feeds. According to Platformer, the algorithm was tweaked so that all of Musk’s tweets bypassed the conventional filters that ensure customized content for users and boosted “by a factor of 1,000 — a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.” Musk initially appeared to openly acknowledge this by tweeting out a meme indicating that he was force-feeding his tweets to everyone on Twitter. But then days later Musk denied that his tweets were boosted.
This whole episode came on the heels of Musk’s reportedly firing a top engineer after the engineer suggested that some of Musk’s decline in engagement may have been the function of general decline in interest in him.
There are a number of “maybe this is a tyranny” red flags in these reports. Musk’s attempts to boost his tweets above everybody else’s, and his apparent concern about being outshined by anybody else, are at odds with his purported commitment to make Twitter a freer public square. Insisting that the platform owner gets a special megaphone that everyone has to listen to is a bald power play,…
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