Man baby tantrum again because Biden's Tweet got far more impressions. A 53 year old acting like a spoilt child.
Elon Musk attacked my article accusing him of gaming Twitter's algorithm for more attention. In some ways, it gave him exactly what he wanted.
Elon Musk sat in a sky box at State Farm Stadium watching the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, with News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and his daughter Elisabeth Murdoch.
It was a balmy day, 75 degrees, and the Kansas City Chiefs were up against the Philadelphia Eagles. As usual, Musk split his attention, alternating between scrolling on his phone and watching the game.
Shortly after kickoff, Musk tweeted, "Go Eagles!!!" along with six American flag emoji. Less than an hour later,
President Biden posted his support for the Eagles, too. "As your president, I'm not picking favorites," he said. "But as Jill Biden's husband, fly Eagles, fly." The text appeared above a video that showed Jill Biden wearing an Eagles jersey that read "Biden" over the number 46.
Few would dispute the fact that Musk was generally better at using
Twitter than Joe Biden. But Biden's Super Bowl tweet was the clear winner. It was jokey and cute, an unselfconscious ode to his wife. Musk checked the view counts.
His tweet had 9.1 million impressions. Biden's tweet had 29 million.
Then, around 8:15 p.m. Pacific time, the game ended. The Eagles had lost on a last-second field goal, 38 – 35. Musk was furious. He deleted his tweet.
Musk got on his jet and flew from Arizona to Oakland. He was headed straight for
Twitter's office.
Monday, February 13, 2023, was a rare cloudy day in Santa Barbara. While Musk was traveling back from the Super Bowl, I'd been flying from Oakland to Santa Barbara, after a whirlwind reporting trip on which I'd somehow thought I could bring my one-year-old daughter and still get work done. I was glad to be home.
I was surprised when I opened Twitter to see an entire feed of Elon Musk. There he was, tweeting about
Dogecoin. There he was again, commenting on a video of a shirtless man in the snow with two pickaxes. And again, talking **** about the press: "Vanity Unfair has fallen so far (sigh)." OK, what was going on?
"Is everyone else's entire For You Page Elon replies," I asked on Twitter. More than nine hundred people responded, most of them with variations of yes.
My phone buzzed. An unknown number was messaging me on Signal.
"Hi is this Zoe?" the message read. "I am a current
Twitter employee and I want to share some details if you're interested."
In a past life, the message would've made me ecstatic. But I'd grown wary since reporting on Elon Musk. Nearly every time I published a story about the CEO, my messages flooded with angry dispatches from his fans. It wasn't hard to imagine that one might try to trick me by trying to pose as a possible source.
I asked for identity verification. When the employee sent over a badge and an ID, I asked what they wanted to talk about.
"Basically, over the past week, Elon has grown more frustrated with the engagement counts dropping; last week he fired an engineer over this," the employee said, referring to Yang.
"He's been pushing all engineers to do investigations daily. Meetings are scheduled at 11 p.m. and often last till midnight. The issue we are solving is simple: why are Elon's tweet counts dropping. It's that and only that — not about other accounts."
I reached out to a handful of current employees to see what they knew.
The more people I spoke to, the more insane the story got, as employees revealed the full details of what had happened the previous evening on "engagement night," which is what they called the post–
Super Bowl work marathon that resulted in Twitter artificially boosting Musk's tweets.
I received a document titled "all hands on deck" in which the stated goal was to "figure out why engagement is different between these tweets" (the tweets in the document were Musk's and Biden's Eagles tweets, which were posted the day of the Super Bowl), along with a snapshot of Twitter's code that showed Musk's tweets were being boosted. More documents followed.
Once I had everything I needed, I told Casey Newton it was time to go. We hit publish.
"Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first," the Platformer headline read. "After his super bowl tweet did worse numbers than President Biden's, Twitter's CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm."
The story was an immediate hit on Twitter, confirming what many had suspected but no one had been able to prove: Musk was rigging the game to favor his own account.
The next few days went by without any major news.
Musk had more or less admitted that there was something fishy going on with the algorithm, tweeting the meme of force-feeding his tweets to regular users, and writing, "Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh … 'algorithm.'"
But on February 17, the CEO came out swinging, publicly disputing my reporting for the first time. "The 'source' of the bogus Platformer article is a disgruntled employee who had been on paid time off for months, had already accepted a job at Google and felt the need to poison the well on the way out," he said. "Twitter will be taking legal action against him."
What the hell? I thought.
What is he talking about?
All my sources for the story were current Twitter employees. Had the new source who'd reached out to me about the story left and gone to Google in the three days since the article had come out? I tried calling, but the source didn't answer. I called again. No answer. Now I was starting to panic.
Already, a reporter at Insider was reaching out, asking me and Newton if we wanted to comment on Musk's allegations.
Then I got an unexpected call from a contact at Whistleblower Aid, an organization that had coordinated two exposés with The Washington Post. They were concerned Musk was going to sue one of their clients, who was in fact a former Twitter employee who'd gone to work at Google.
On January 24, The Washington Post had published an explosive report detailing alleged privacy violations from a new Twitter whistleblower. The whistleblower claimed that Twitter's security controls were so relaxed that any engineer could access a feature called "GodMode," allowing them to tweet from any account —including the accounts belonging to Elon Musk and Barack Obama.
"In the past, there was a way to take the tweet service, run it yourself, and tell it to make a tweet as anybody," a former employee told me. "It would then send the tweet to the backend, and the backend didn't have any way of knowing that it wasn't the main tweet service." In other words, Twitter didn't have strong protections against internal attacks.
(Current Twitter employees were skeptical of the whistleblower's claims. The program he was referring to, which had since been renamed "preferred mode," was now carefully tracked. "Engineers are not incentivized to mess with user data anymore than your UPS driver is motivated to contaminate your parcels," one told me. I had found this argument slightly ahistorical. In December 2022, a former Twitter employee had been sentenced to three years in prison for spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia. Clearly, the company
did need to worry about internal threats, even if they were rare.)
Now, three weeks after the Washington Post article came out, I was seriously confused. Musk seemed to be implying that the GodMode whistleblower, whom I'd never spoken to and who was no longer working at Twitter, was somehow feeding me accurate information about what was currently going on at the company.
As I tried to work out what was going on, my source called back, and we were able to speak on FaceTime. They were still working at Twitter. They felt understandably nervous about Musk's tweet, but they had no idea what he was talking about.
Newton and I put out a forceful statement saying we stood by our reporting, and Musk never followed through on his threat.
In some ways, my story had already played right into his hands, making him the main character of the day. First, Twitter had been full of Musk's tweets; then it was full of tweets complaining that there were too many Musk tweets; and then my reporting explaining what had happened just drew attention back to him.
By the end of the week, did anyone even remember there had been a Super Bowl?
