Elon Musk, Dril, and MrBeast are being boosted by Twitter for some reason.
Although Musk has previously stated that everyone should be treated equally, Platformer has found that the network keeps a list of users whose visibility it has secretly been boosting.
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Some of the high-profile figures in the eclectic group include President Joe Biden, internet stalwarts like MrBeast and Dril, and political commentators like Matthew Yglesias and Ben Shapiro.
According to Platformer, the list contains a total of about 35 different people who get special treatment alongside Musk and was initially created to help keep track of the way modifications to Twitter’s algorithms affect the visibility of the site’s most popular users.
To help assuage Musk’s concerns, Twitter’s engineers developed a way to “tweak” the site’s ranking system so that the tweets from those accounts were always shown, helping to keep the CEO from panicking.
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That’s part of the reason why users saw Musk all over their timelines in February, as it essentially exempts these accounts from Twitter’s algorithm (although Platformer says Musk’s boost was different from what all the other users receive)
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Platformer states the chief executive flags the complaints of high-profile users over those of average ones, forcing them to act as a highly paid customer support team for Musk and his most preferred users.
It doesn’t mean that everyone on the list is someone Musk always agrees with, even though Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did make the list despite their butting heads in the past.
This whole ranking system has some employees wondering why Musk plans to open-source the code at all, as they believe he is only going to choose a very specific part of it to share.
In addition to maintaining a list of verified accounts, the social network continues to prioritize them.
The platform already gives priority to verified users in its replies, and Musk announced on Monday that it will only recommend verified accounts in April.