Twitter has a supposedly secret VIP user list that boosts certain users in its recommendation algorithm. The select team, according to documents obtained by the Platformer newsletter, would include the CEO of the social network, Elon Musk, American President Joe Biden, Ben Shapiro, conservative commentator and founder of Daily Wire, NBA star LeBron James, in addition to American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The list would consist of about 35 selected users.
The revelation comes after Musk said he would leave Twitter’s recommendation algorithms open source, in addition to saying that, soon, only paid Twitter Blue subscribers would be eligible to have their posts appear in the “For You” recommendations feed. It is not known whether this change would affect such a VIP list.
According to Platformer, the list would have been “originally created to monitor the engagement received by advanced Twitter users”, as the company tried to ward off suspicions that their “shadowbans” reduce their visibility on the platform. “Our ‘algorithm’ is overly complex and not fully understood internally,” Musk recently tweeted.
But CEO vanity is nothing new. Last month, Musk said the network was fixing an issue that made his own tweets too prominent. Later, the same Platformer reported that Twitter employees changed the algorithm to favor the executive, after his post about the Super Bowl was less popular than Biden’s. According to the newsletter, Musk even fired an engineer who suggested that the lack of engagement was due to declining interest in his private content.
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