Elon Musk put the popular ‘padlock’ on him so that only the people who follow him can see his tweets. What did he get?
Elon Musk , billionaire current owner of Twitter , made his profile with more than 127 million followers private to prove an error reported by users.
“I made my account private until tomorrow morning to test if they see my private tweets more than the public ones,” Musk said in a message posted early Wednesday morning.
What is Elon Musk testing?
According to Musk, users are reporting that tweets are getting more reach when they are private, where the availability is only visible to people who follow the account, and not when it is in public mode, with no restrictions.
Musk will apparently spend the rest of the day testing this experiment, apparently in response to conservative users like LibsofTikTok and Ben Shapiro, who have reported running their own tests to show that locked accounts generate more views than public accounts.
However, the measure has been the victim of jokes from users, who “point out that Musk himself does not know how his app works”, which he acquired for 44 billion dollars.
One account with nearly 70,000 followers joked that Musk needed to execute “a high school student’s idea of an experiment to figure out how the company’s algorithm works because he fired anyone who could have possibly explained it to him.” In November, Musk had to start hiring engineers after mass layoffs and changes to Twitter ‘s job benefits led many engineers to leave the company , apparently threatening to destabilize the platform and lead to crashes.
Own analysis
A New York Times report analyzed 20,000 Musk tweets posted over the past five years to assess how Musk uses the platform and to explore whether he is fulfilling his own stated goal of driving diverse viewpoints on the platform.
That analysis found that Musk primarily follows accounts run by men and organizations tied to his own businesses, while posting “all hours of the day, most days of the week.” Increasingly, Musk is spending more time responding to fans who mention him directly in tweets praising him. With 128 million followers, even Musk’s deleted tweets are widely viewed across the platform, but with this experiment, he is apparently questioning whether Musk’s platform is limiting views of his own tweets.