Twitter's algorithm is so broken that users have discovered they can increase and improve engagement with their tweets by locking their accounts, and even CEO Elon Musk has had to test it out in order to find out what's going on.
Musk took to Twitter on Wednesday stating "Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you see my private tweets more than my public ones."
This all started after Ian Miles Cheong posted the results of an experiment conducted on Twitter, revealing that setting your account to private "vastly improves your reach by a factor of 5x." Musk commented stating that the findings were "extremely concerning." He reiterated the sentiment in a response to Libs of TikTok on Twitter after it stated "put my account on private because apparently that’s the only way people will see your tweets." Musk said "something is wrong" and elsewhere "something fundamental is wrong" regarding the issue.
Elon goes private
About 24 hours after he posted about his own experiment, Musk revealed the change "helped identify some issues with the system" that should be addressed by next week. It makes you wonder why Elon wouldn't rather consult with the team of engineers at Twitter regarding the issue. One commenter described it as "genuinely hysterical" that Twitter's algorithm "is in such a poor state to the point the CEO has to do field experiments" rather than consult the engineering department.
Yet "going private" is actually quite a well-established way of growing online. Overnight, the Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz took to Twitter and resurfaced her 2018 article for The Atlantic which revealed how influencers on platforms like Instagram were using account privacy to spur growth. "People go private because they get more followers when a follower sends a post to their friends and that person has to follow the account in order to see. It’s that simple," one social media specialist told her.
However, Musk's response seems to suggest he doesn't think that this is the way Twitter should operate, so it may be that he's planning to alter this going forward.
