Elon Musk has been worried about concerns over his tweets’ visibility for some weeks. Last week, the Twitter CEO last week tried a day of making his account private to see whether that would increase the amount of his audience. The action was taken in response to complaints from many well-known right-wing accounts with whom Musk communicates that Twitter’s recent adjustments have decreased their reach.
In search of solutions on Tuesday, Musk summoned a team of engineers and consultants in a room at Twitter’s headquarters. Why is his engagement rate plummeting?
According to numerous sources with direct knowledge of the meeting, he said, “This is ludicrous.” I’m only receiving tens of thousands of impressions despite having more than 100 million followers.
One of the company’s two surviving major engineers gave a potential explanation for Musk’s dwindling influence: the public’s interest in the Tesla CEO’s antics is waning just over a year after his stunning attempt to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
Employees displayed a Google Trends chart and internal data about Musk’s account engagement. They informed him that, as indicated by a score of “100,” Musk reached “peak” popularity in search rankings in April of last year. He now has a score of nine. Musk’s reach may have been artificially restricted in the past, but engineers looked into this possibility and found no proof that the algorithm was prejudiced against him.
The news was not favorably received by Musk.
Musk yelled at the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.” (Platformer withholds the engineer’s name due to Musk’s abuse of former Twitter workers.)
According to a current employee, Musk has told staff to keep track of how frequently each of his tweets is recommended since he is dissatisfied with the engineers’ present performance.
Since Twitter provided public view numbers for each tweet, seven weeks have passed. At the time, Musk stated that the function will let people throughout the world understand how vibrant the platform is.
As over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply, or like because those are public acts, he tweeted, “Shows how much more active Twitter is than it may seem.”
However, almost two months later, view counts have had the opposite impact, highlighting how little engagement most postings receive in comparison to the size of their readership. At the same time, recent research found that since Musk took over, Twitter usage in the United States has decreased by almost 9%.
According to Twitter sources, the view count feature may be to blame for the fall in engagement and consequently, views. To make room for the view display, the like and retweet buttons were shrunk, making them more difficult to press.