Twitter does not kill or kill, but does it do: Musk apologizes to Twitter and the Slack and Blind sections of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers
Now that Musk is going to buy Twitter, he has already started meeting with some leaders across the company. On Wednesday, he showed up to Twitter’s San Fransisco headquarters carrying a literal kitchen sink and held an impromptu discussion at Twitter’s coffee bar. There he downplayed a recent report that he would lay off 75-percent of Twitter employees, though many employees are still expecting deep cuts.
But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” It is repetitive and uninteresting but occasionally at random intervals, some compelling tidbits will appear. B.F. Skinner said that rats and pigeons are good at generating pathological behaviors because of unpredictable rewards.
According to a New York University author of a book about gambling machine design, not a single engineer of the social media service ever said that they were creating a Skinner box. She said that it is what they have built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
An employee told me that the two groups at the company are those that Musk is heavily involved in, and the other that is not.
Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. A current Twitter employee who asked anonymity to speak without the company’s permission said that he had been completely absent for weeks. One person said that the man has ghosted them. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.
Two people familiar with the deal said Thursday that Musk took control of the company and axed the CEO, CFO and lawyer.
The Meltdown of Musk, Gadde and Twitter: How to Stop the Hellscape from Facing Advertisers with a Social Media Account?
A Delaware judge set a deadline for the deal to be finalized on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
According to text messages, Musk clashed with Agrawal in April, before making a bid for the company.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. There have been racist and misogynistic attacks against Gadde, who heads public policy and safety at Twitpic, as well as calls for Musk to fire her. She was fired on Thursday and the harassing messages lit up again.
In his first big move earlier on Thursday, Musk tried to soothe leery Twitter advertisers saying that he is buying the platform to help humanity and doesn’t want it to become a “free-for-all hellscape.”
He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
“Even slightly loosening content moderation on the platform is sure to spook advertisers, many of whom already find Twitter’s brand safety tools to be lacking compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.
“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
Twitter, Politics, and the Public Sector: What Will Trump Say About Musk’s Twitter Message to Ads? The Times of an Editor’s Note
The New York Stock Exchange notified its investors that it would stop trading in shares of Twitter before the market opens on Friday because the company is going private.
Top sales executive Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.
Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
Musk has been obsessed with how much engagement his posts are getting. Platformer fired one of the two remaining Principal Engineers at the company after the engineer told him that his views on Musk’s social media have fallen because of the decline in interest in him.
In fact, not only has Musk himself contaminated the information environment he now reigns over, but he is apparently working to dismantle the little infrastructure erected to help users sift through the daily chaos. CNN has reported that public figures who don’t pay will lose their blue verified badges.
It might seem as if the business story is about charging for verified badges. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will make it much harder for users to distinguish authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. The air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives if they take away those blue checks.
What Happened Inside of Musk’s Twitter Teams, After his Layoffs, Was Yours to Take a Glimpse
The best thing one can do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email and reduce hacking would be to authenticating users, according to Musk’s authorized biographer.
Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.
Today, we would like to discuss how the company bungled its layoffs, what happened inside of them on Monday, and what a paywall might look like.
Managers agonized over the decisions, and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.
Some teams were cut more than others. As it turned out, the company went too far. Within hours after the layoffs were announced, some managers were told to ask laid-off employees if they wanted to return to their old jobs.
It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. Within one day, it had been posted in public channels.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible
What’s going on at the LHC? How many engineers and designers do you want to stay in Musk? And what will they do if they decide to stay?
We have the opportunity to ask those people if they want to come back, I apologize to everybody on the weekend. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. If any of you have been in touch with people who might come back and help us, please give us a nomination before 4.
The manager thinks that we might use a bit of Apple help. Platformer is told that the company reached out to engineers and designers over the last day in an attempt to get them back.
Now workers fear that if they they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.
Workers are talking with lawyers about their options if they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.
Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. A person that I spoke with said that a technical manager shouldn’t only manage a limited number of contributors but should also spend most of their time writing code. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.
“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no chart and no idea who your manager is are what’s going on.
Why did Twitter re-introduce a gray Official badge in November? An employee question about the Musk transition and why employees are worried about the health benefits?
There was no end to the disruption on Friday. In its latest reversal on the matter, Twitter said it would re-introduce a gray “Official” badge for select accounts to help confirm their identities. A wave of verified-account impostors posing as Nintendo, former President Donald Trump and Eli Lilly was the reason for the decision. The reason for the account being created was the decision by Musk to immediately offer a blue check mark to any account holder willing to pay $8 a month, without any questions asked in order to find new ways to make money from the platform.
Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. The All-In radio show is co-hosted by venture capitalist Sacks, as well as some of their followers on social media: VC Chamath Palihapitiya, and also former adviser to the Musk Musk transition, who are now both working as business consultants.
The vice president told employees that there is a podcast that covers the current layoffs in tech and provides insight into why this is happening. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understanding the macro environment we are operating in.”
Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.
I was told that some teams had begun to hold meetings in which their employees were informed of who their managers are and what their priorities will be.
The company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, but on one hand, it has added 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible
Social Media Ads and the Launch of Verified e-Twitter in the Wild: Musk and Sacks Revisited
The release notes for the new Blue version of the app stated that it was now available. (The copy, written by Calacanis, was widely derided for sounding like a phishing email.) The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.
The company decided to delay the launch of new verified accounts due to a debate over the potential effects of the election in the middle of the year.
According to a person close to the matter, Musk and Sacks have discussed the idea recently. One such plan might allow everyone to use Twitter for a limited amount of time each month but require a subscription to continue browsing, the person said.
There are other employees who have warned regarding the secondary feature of the new Blue, which was added at the last minute. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user in the United States by making that change, sources said. If the ad-light plan is enacted, it will cause a financial loss for the social network as it will lose money on Blue.
Musk has been heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue, participating in standup meetings and exchanging regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company. “There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to meeting notes shared with employees in Slack.
Nobody knows how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.
Is Elon Musk Really Talking About New Twitter? Lurking isn’t Doomscrolling: A Step Towards Reversing the Power of Twitter
Musk said last Thursday that small talk feels like it is coming from his own mind. We all live in Tiny Talk Town, and we all talk about Elon Musk.
Quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of working overtime in a way that depletes your own savings, and instead opting to not work overtime at all. It’s about not giving more to a platform than people are used to getting back on. If you want to stay on this new social networking tool, you need a way to use it without being used.
A relatively small group of people power Twitter. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”
So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) In reality, nearly half of Twitter users tweet less than five times a month, and most of their posts are replies, not original tweets. They check in on current events when they’re on the news, and then they go about their lives. They are called lurkers.
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. The approach of choosing to sit back and observe for a while and to lurk is basically a simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos of New Twitter. Open your app or browser and check in on Musk’s new toy. Send a tweet, then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. For another time, save your original thoughts.
In a single week, one of the world’s most influential networks has laid off half its workforce, blew up key aspects of its product, and introduced other features to compensate for it.
It’s a stunning reversal of fortunes not just for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion, but also for a platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet, including world leaders, CEOs, and the Pope.
The Musk/Frohnhoefer Discordance: When Twitter Becomes Slower on Android, When Twitter Goes Free
The only place where you could sign up for the add-on was removed on Friday just two days after it was officially launched, with the menu option to sign up being the only other place to find it. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.
Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.
There is not an official name for accounts but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception.
misinformation experts were critical of the paid verification feature, warning that it would make finding trustworthy information much more difficult during the crucial period after the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.
It’s from one business to another, for when you have customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.
“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Alternatively, bring back the micro-messaging service. It is possible to make Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”
The Musk and Frohnhoefer conversation is long, it is messy and it is difficult to follow on social media. At one point, Musk asked Frohnhoefer what he had personally done to fix Twitter being slow on Android — though remember that the conversation started with Musk’s apology for it being slow in “many countries” — not on Android. But Musk’s seemingly final word on it came in response to a discussion on whether Frohnhoefer should’ve brought his concerns about the original tweet up in private on Slack rather than publicly calling Musk out. A person in the thread said that Musk likely does not want Frohnhoefer on his team, after the developer commented on Musk asking privately about the slowness issues.
The time that Trump was inaugurated was when I told colleagues in my newsroom that they shouldn’t cover everything he said. It used to be that a president’s every word was assumed to be a signal of future policy. A lot of what Trump said was meant to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. What he says is true.
This is how the coverage of Trump worked. While the right-wing media treated his egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy as unimportant, the liberal media said that he was clearly fit to be president and that he would only succeed in bringing himself down in flames. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The public was forced to understand what was happening across the country in incompatible narratives due to the behavior of one man in the White House.
This is how Musk is interacting with the world. The relationship between the new owner and the journalists who cover him can be described by Friedersdorf as a dysfunctional one, in which the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are amplified in a never-ending cycle.
Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt; after all, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that later turned out to be at least partly true, and maybe his idea of amnesty for suspended accounts is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild overall trust in the platform. But I think that strays toward both-sides-ism and misses the point.
Kara Alaimo is a professor at the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication and writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book “This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — In 2024, And How We Can Reclaim It will be published by Alcove Press. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has an opinion on it.
In tweets, Musk accused the journalists of violating the platform’s policy against doxing — or posting private information online — by sharing his “exact real-time” location. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post didn’t appear to have done so. Musk and Twitter didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
A healthy town square should also be a place where people can find reliable information. But researchers at Tufts University recently found that tweets refuting hate and misinformation were “an order of magnitude greater” on Twitter before Musk took over.
The account suspensions came on the heels of Twitter’s announcement on Monday that it was disbanding its Trust and Safety Council — a group of outside experts that advised the company on issues like human rights, child sexual exploitation and mental health.
It is obvious that we cannot rely on Musk for a safe, open forum. We should have new social networks run by boards that are aware of the public’s interest when making decisions about things like community standards. Many people with these skills have already been let go from their jobs. Since Musk took over, there has been layoffs at a number of tech and journalism companies, including Facebook and CNN. There are some professionals who should work together to build new social platforms that will give the open town hall we desperately need.
Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspensions following the results of a public poll on the site. The poll showed that 58.7% of the people wanted the suspension to be immediately unsuspend and 48.6% recommended it be lifted in seven days.
Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, also with no explanation, she told The Associated Press.
The same day, she cited reports that Musk was reneging on severance for laid-off Twitter employees, threatening workers who talk to the media and refusing to make rent payments. Lopez said his actions were “the classic elyn going forbroke behavior.”
The Mastodon ban, Mashable’s ban, and a “leading bug” on Twitter: a warning to advertisers, not journalists
Stephane Dujarric said that the move sets a dangerous precedent, and that journalists all over the world are facing threats and even worse.
Mastodon’s official account was banned because it was thought to be promoting the network. It had a verified jet- tracking account. Links to Mastodon accounts have been blocked by Twitter in certain cases, which is due to the fact they could possibly be a form of malicious software.
The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said technology reporter Drew Harwell “was banished without warning, process or explanation” following the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.
CNN said that the suspension of several reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan, is worrisome but not surprising.
A suspended journalist, Matt Binder, of the technology news outlet, Mashable, said he was banned immediately after sharing a picture that O’ Sullivan had posted.
There is a statement from the LA Police Department sent to multiple media outlets earlier Thursday about their contact with Musk’s representatives.
He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”
The old regime was ruled by its own biases and she said that the new regime has the same problem.
If the suspensions lead to the outflow of media organizations that are active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, according to a former Bank of America head of global media.
The media organizations remained on the platform despite CBS temporarily shutting down its account due to uncertainty about new management.
It is now time to go after journalists that really saws at the main tent pole of Twitter. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”
The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.
Shortly after Musk abruptly signed out of the room where he was being questioned about the ousting, the Spaces conference chat went down. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Late Friday, Spaces returned.
Advertisers are also monitoring the potential loss of Twitter users. According to a forecast by Insider Intelligence, the social networking site is predicted to lose almost 30 million users in the next two years due to technical issues and accounts being banned for offensive posts.
“A platform cannot continue to go viral perpetually,” Rochko recently told CNN about Mastodon’s sagging user numbers. “The cycle of media news and attention on social media just simply goes away after awhile, but behind it leaves organic growth which is what we had before November and which we still have now.”
WIRED has written frequently of late about Elon Musk’s Twitter, so forgive me for coming back to it—but for those of us as terminally online as I am, let me just ask: What the hell happened last weekend?
I woke up on Sunday morning to learn that my mention of any of the services that had been petted would be deleted from the public sphere by the social media platform. It was claimed to be about “preventing free advertising” of the platform’s competitors and to “cut down on spam.” The great link ban was mostly about controlling speech in the name of Musk, and anyone can tell that this was a cover story.
I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate on the true motives behind Sunday’s whiplash After all, intention and impact are separate things. They did not intend to hit you in the face, but they did hit you. Now you have to deal with the situation that they’ve created. So my thoughts instead turn—and I hope yours will also—to the people impacted by the weekend’s policy change. Those Twitter users who spent Sunday wondering whether the platform they used and trusted to find and promote their work, make connections with others in their field, and in many cases, rely on for income, would allow them to continue.
There are platforms and power that we talk about at WIRED. The CEO, founder or middle manager of a platform has an unenviable job setting and enforcing the policies and guidelines for that platform. That’s not in question. Online spaces can go bad fast if there are no rules. What is an issue is when those platforms choose to actively harm their users through policy decisions, and when those changes are large enough to force users to either adapt or abandon ship.
My friends on twitch stopped their streams to talk about the news, worried that if they couldn’t announce their new stream on twitch, viewers wouldn’t find them, or they wouldn’t be able to put a link to their bio on their website. I would argue that these things created potential for lost income in people who are in need more than the people who made the decisions. After all, these same creators have the kind of disruptive, entrepreneurial spirit that everyone in Silicon Valley claims to want to foster and empower.
After Sarah Oh lost her job as a human rights advisor at Twitter late last year in the first round of layoffs following Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the company, she decided to join a friend in building a rival service.
T2 is available in the alpha and was launched by Gabor Cselle who worked at both of the internet’s largest companies. It provides a social feed with different character limits. The focal point is safety, according to Oh.
We want to create an experience that allows people to share what they want to share without fearing the risk of being harassed or abused, and we are well positioned to deliver on that, Oh told CNN.
Since Musk completed his takeover, there have been a number of new services that have gained traction by appealing to users that are uncomfortable with the billionaire’s decisions.
The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk’s Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Some apps like T2 have the same resemblance to the micro-messaging service.
Last month, for example, the founders of Instagram announced Artifact, “a personalized news feed” powered by artificial intelligence, a description that quickly earned it comparisons to Twitter. In CNN’s recent test of the app, however, it resembled news reader applications like Apple News or the defunct Google Reader. Artifact displayed popular articles from large media organizations and smaller bloggers in a main feed, tailored to users based on their activity and selected interests.
But all of these apps appear to be vying for the opportunity to scratch the itch users may feel for a news feed that isn’t Twitter — at least for as long as that itch lasts.
It may be a challenge to replace it with a robust network of journalists, politicians and entertainers. While apps like Cohost have seen renewed momentum, their audiences remain a small fraction of the size of Twitter, which had more than 200 million daily active users as of last year.
“People have been referring to us when they do as a Twitter alternative, which I think is an important distinction from a Twitter replacement,” Kaplan said.
In November, shortly after taking over the company, Musk claimed that users continued to abandon the social network despite the initial calls to leave. The company stopped reporting user numbers in quarterly securities filings as part of the acquisition.
“If people leave, where do they go? By all accounts, there is no platform right now that is able to take on the function of Twitter, and nothing is really prepared for it,” said Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “No platform has the global user base, representing people from all walks of life the way that Twitter does.”
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. Thank you for helping out, please thumbs this post up.
When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
The CEO of TWoup flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday to demand answers from his team, after the Eagles lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl.
Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code enables Musk to flood the core ranked feed with accounts, circumventing measures that would otherwise prevent a single account from doing so.
That’s the reason why people opening the app Monday saw that Musk dominated the feed with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.
After Monday’s uproar, he implied that the changes would be walked back, at least in part. “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… He said he was referring to algorithm.
The artificial boost on his account is still in place despite the factor falling below 1,000. Musk’s handful of tweets Tuesday reported around 43 million impressions, which are on the high end of his recent average.
Absurd as Musk’s antics are, they do highlight a tension familiar to almost anyone who has ever used a social network: why are some posts more popular than others? I’m not seeing that thing and it’s not that one.
Engineers for services like TikTok and Instagram can offer partial, high-level answers to these questions. The easiest way for anyone to say something is if they see it but a ranking algorithmic makes predictions based on hundreds or thousands of signals and delivers posts to millions of users.
The main reason for the discrepancy is that people think that some things are better than others. But it doesn’t have to work like that: you could also change the ranking algorithms so that they show your posts no matter what.
“Measurement Made Easy”: Revisiting A Manipulative CEO: Towards an Effective Social Media System for Increasing Engagement
“He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” said a current employee. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”