Musk locks his Twitter account to personally test reported malfunction
Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)
On Wednesday morning, Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account, telling users, Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you see my private tweets more than my public ones."
Since then, Twitter users have poked fun at Musk for seemingly not knowing how the platform works-or at least not having Twitter engineers available who can explain it to him. One account with nearly 70,000 followers joked that Musk needed to run a middle schooler'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." Back in November, Musk had to start recruiting engineers after mass layoffs and Twitter's changing workplace benefits led many engineers to exit Twitter, seemingly threatening to destabilize the platform and trigger malfunctions.
genuinely hilarious that he spent 44 billion dollars on a company, but still needs to run a middle schooler'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 pic.twitter.com/LhcQSVerfx
- KnowNothing (@KnowNothingTV) February 1, 2023
Musk will apparently be spending the rest of today testing out this experiment, seemingly in response to conservative users like LibsofTikTok and Ben Shapiro, who reported running their own tests to prove that locked accounts generate more views than public accounts.