Elon Musk Appears to Expose Potential Bias After Firing Twitter Engineer in Engagement ‘Glitch’ Investigation

At the end of January, conservative commentator Monica Crowley took her account off private. She noticed however that while she had her account locked her engagement took off, this sparked many others to see if locking their accounts did the same for them.

Crowley shared on Twitter:

“Took my account off Private now but man, while it was locked engagement flew (minus the ability to RT). I assume @elonmusk is on top of this, in addition to revolutionizing AI, creating EVs, and putting men on Mars”

Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded to a meme someone made about the issue:

“Something fundamental is wrong”

Musk had also made his account private to do a test and shared that it helped identify issues.

“Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you see my private tweets more than my public ones”.

“This helped identify some issues with the system. Should be addressed by next week.”

On Tuesday a meeting to discuss the issues with Twitter engineers was set up. According to Platformer Musk asked his team to address the issue and wanted to know what was up.

It appears that instead of addressing Musk’s concern one of the company’s principal engineers offered an explanation that seemed to sidestep the problem at hand.

Musk was shown internal data regarding engagement with his account as well as a Google trends chart. He was then told his “peak” popularity was last April and was at “100” now his engagement is at a “9”. They couldn’t find a source that would have artificially restricted his reach and claimed according to Platformer, “no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.”

As it seems to have appeared to Musk that the engineer didn’t investigate what he hand wanted, he wasn’t happy with the response that seems to have gone off in a completely different direction.

Platformer shared, “Musk did not take the news well.”

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk reportedly told the engineer… Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.”

There seem to be many other issues currently affecting Twitter as well.

ALX shared that il Donaldo Trumpo was suspended, and it came to light that it was in error.

“BREAKING: Popular meme account @papitrumpo, who had 700k followers, has been suspended from Twitter.”

Ella Girwin responded, “Account was not adhering to our parody policy which is what triggered the suspension however this was an overly strict application of the policy given language and other factors. Team is correcting this action.”

It seems many Twitter employees are not yet still on the same page as Musk, and he has to continue pushing back with varying levels of effectiveness to keep things running the way he wants them to.

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