San Francisco: Nearly four months into Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter, one of the most influential social media websites has been transformed into a mercurial billionaire's personal sandbox.
Twitter users knew the site would change under Musk, who purchased the company in October for $44 billion and installed himself as CEO on a promise of restoring "free speech." What many underestimated was the extent to which Musk would make wholesale changes with the potential to disrupt the experience across the site for his own benefit.
That approach was illustrated dramatically this week when the site Platformer reported Twitter had made major algorithmic changes - on Musk's orders - that resulted in users seeing the billionaire's tweets first. Musk had been worried that his engagement was declining: His tweet throwing support behind the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl had not performed as well as President Biden's, for example. The fix that Twitter rolled out pushed Musk's tweets to the top of many users' feeds, something widely noted by users.
Twitter's public data backs that up.
A new feature displaying view counts on tweets that rolled out late last year showed Musk's tweets at the time were driving massive engagement, including more than 1 billion views on Dec. 18, for example. All in all, Musk's tweets on a typical day in December were shown 231 million times.
But that number dropped off substantially this year. Between Jan. 1 and the Super Bowl, Musk's tweets were shown only 137 million times on a typical day. This week, after his posts were artificially boosted, he's back up to around 400 million per day, according to a Washington Post analysis of the view counts.
Musk is a prolific Twitter user, who has a penchant for tweeting his mind and sometimes landing himself in trouble in the process. Appearing in court last month over an infamous 2018 tweet he had "Funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 a share, Musk said he sees the site as an effective way to communicate with the public, both to disseminate company information and "memes."
Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk has nearly 130 million followers, making him one of the site's most popular users. He first indicated he was pursuing Twitter in April, saying he wanted to restore "free speech" and tackle the site's persistent problem of spam and bots.
But several former Twitter employees, including some with direct knowledge of the issues he prioritized, said Musk's changes were often geared toward improving his own user experience. Data has emerged showing how he has benefited from the changes, and examples have piled up month after month of specific actions geared toward improving his personal experience on the site. The former employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
At Twitter, Musk has bent the company to his impulses in ways that might be less feasible at publicly traded Tesla, where he also serves as chief executive, and which has a corporate board, unlike Twitter.
And at one point, Musk was so hellbent on eliminating spam and bots on the site, for example, that Twitter - which uses phone numbers to verify the authenticity of accounts - banned entire country codes from its system, according to the people with knowledge of the matter.
That created a problem: one of the countries affected, Ukraine, is in the midst of a prolonged war with Russia, where social media has played a key strategic role. Ukrainians suddenly found they could not post on Twitter.
And since Musk took over as Twitter CEO, the list of major changes includes several with a direct benefit to Musk, former employees said, with little potential upside for the rest of users.
