Have you ever opened Twitter and, constantly, find in the feed i post di Elon Musk? Probably yes. After all, the Tesla CEO is better known for his tweets than for his private life, so we can expect some visibility from his posts, right? Actually not really.
Twitter favors tweets from Elon Musk (and others)
Apparently the Twitter algorithm isn’t as fair as it seems. A doubt that had already arisen when Musk himself promised that posts to subscribers to Twitter Blue they would have had “more visibility”. Last month, then, the situation became grotesque: for a few hours, users saw only Elon Musk’s tweets on their homepage. A nightmare!
To understand more, Platformer has studied the phenomenon. The result is alarming: the Twitter algorithm has a sort of fast track for certain users. The portal reports that not only Elon Musk, but other major accounts, would benefit from what Platformer calls “secret VIP list”. Sure, that sounds like a conspiracy theory. In reality, the phenomenon is anything but unreal, given that Twitter would actually give a boost to certain accounts present in this “list”.
Who else is on the secret VIP list?
According to Newsletter Platformer, the list includes a few dozen accounts. Among these too US President Joe Biden and YouTuber Mr Beast. Both accounts would benefit from a boost though do not have an active Twitter Blue subscription.
The VIP list was reportedly “originally created to track the engagement received by Twitter power users.” “Our algorithm is very complex and not fully understood internally,” Musk recently tweeted. An elegant way to say: “we are trying to understand something too”.
The account reportedly includes only 35 accounts other than Elon Musk’s. Platformer has not published the entire list of names, but has said that this includes LeBron Jamesthe representative of the democratic party Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezil venture capitalist Marc Andreessenthe fan account of Tesla (@teslaownerssv) and the conservator Ben Shapiro. It makes you smile, but also reflect, the presence in the list of @catturd2an account recently described by Rolling Stone as “the king of sh*tposting”.
The law is equal for all. The Twitter algorithm doesn’t.