By Saksha Menezes and Olivia Solon
Elon Musk’s test to see how locking his account affected the engagement on his posts helped to identify “issues with the system” the company will address by next week, he said in a tweet Thursday.
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Twitter Inc.’s chief executive officer locked his account early Wednesday after users of the social media site claimed that setting an account to private dramatically improved the number of likes and views their tweets received. He unlocked it about 24 hours later.
Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong tweeted on Tuesday the results of a test, indicating that a tweet sent when his account was set to private, had a far greater reach than the same tweet posted when his account was set to public. Musk responded that this was “extremely concerning” and later pledged to conduct his own experiment.
“Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you see my private tweets more than my public ones,” he tweeted shortly after 6:00 a.m. London time.
It’s the latest in a series of experiments Musk has conducted since he bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October, which included using a Twitter poll to ask people if he should stay on as CEO and switching the timeline to default to an algorithmic feed.
(Published 02 February 2023, 11:15 IST)
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