Musk’s at it again | Mint

Twitter chief Elon Musk has lately been in the news for some outrageous actions. This week, as reported, he had his engineers “fix” the platform’s “bugs” to boost impressions of his tweets after one of them on the Super Bowl didn’t do so well as a tweet by US President Joe Biden—also on the baseball league—despite having many times more followers. Such was his ire that he reportedly threatened a bunch of engineers with ejection from their jobs. Like the proverbial emperor who only a child can call out, he appears not to fathom that the lower impression count might be the result of lower interest in what he said. Nevertheless, his team complied dutifully, or maybe fearfully—recall his reported impulsive firing of an engineer who posited his falling popularity as a possible reason for slipping engagement—and his tweets started showing up on the timelines of users, including many who didn’t even follow him. A tech outlet reported that the fix “artificially boosted” his tweets by a factor of 1,000. Now, whether this was a case of bugs being fixed or rules bent may be hard to check. The pity is that Twitter’s credibility as a platform has begun to hinge on one man’s whimsy.