For several weeks now, Elon Musk has been worrying about how many people are seeing his tweets.
Last week, Twitter’s CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether it could increase the size of his audience.
The move comes after several prominent right-wing accounts with whom Musk complained that recent changes to Twitter have reduced their reach.
On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and consultants in a room at Twitter’s headquarters in search of answers. Why are her engagement numbers tanking?
“It’s ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have over 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
One of the company’s two remaining chief engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s dwindling reach: just a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is decreasing.
The staff showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account with a Google Trends chart.
Last April, he told her, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.”
Today he is on a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s access had been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk didn’t take the news well.
Musk told the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.” (The platform is withholding the engineer’s name in light of harassment directed by Musk at former Twitter employees.)
Dissatisfied with the work the engineers have done so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets is recommended, according to a current worker.
It’s been seven weeks now that Twitter added a public view count to every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better understanding of how alive the platform is.
“Shows that Twitter is more alive than it seems, as over 90% of Twitter users read but do not tweet, reply or like, as these are public actions,” he tweeted.
About two months later, however, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts receive relative to their audience size.
According to a recent study, Twitter usage in the United States has dropped by about 9 percent since Musk’s takeover.
Read More:
- Elon Musk: “Klaus Schwab Is LYING!!!”
- Twitter says low-level use of its API will cost $100 per month.
- Elon Musk admits to making mistakes in his first 6 weeks of owning Twitter: ‘Hey, I just got here, man.’
- Ukraine war: Elon Musk’s SpaceX firm blocks Kyiv from using Starlink technology for drone control
- Elon Musk’s $10,000 House Finally Hitting The Market
Information Source: Platformer