It appears that Elon Musk thinks his own employees are shadowbanning him.
The CEO has some concerns about the recent performance of Twitter, the social media platform he purchased for a whopping $44 billion.
According to a recent report from tech outlet Platformer, the billionaire CEO was reportedly upset with the low engagement on his personal Twitter account and called a meeting with engineers to address the issue.
During the meeting, the engineers attempted to demonstrate with data that people might just be tired of hearing from and about Musk, as interest in him has fallen by a factor of 10 since April 2022.
However, their efforts to explain the situation were not well-received by Musk, who promptly fired one of the top engineers on the spot.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” he declared, according to unnamed sources close to the matter. The billionaire reportedly asked the remaining employees to keep track of the recommendations for each of his posts on the platform.
Since Musk took over Twitter, the site has experienced significant losses, including a drop in advertising revenue and users.
A recent report found that the number of active US users declined by nearly 9% between October 2022 and January 2023.
The site has also instituted a number of unpopular changes that have not gone over well with users, leading to confusion and frustration.
Private accounts on Twitter might not actually be private, and the view counter that has been a source of frustration for Musk might not even be accurate.
Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz conducted her own Twitter test and found that even on a private, locked account with no followers, she still logged tens of views on her tweets.
Twitter also experienced a mass outage recently, in which users were incorrectly sent messages telling them they had reached their tweet limit for the day. The origin of the outage was initially a mystery, but the new report from Platformer explains that an employee accidentally deleted data for the internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter.
In case you need proof that view counts on Twitter aren’t accurate:
I have a locked, private account with ZERO followers for reporting purposes. I just posted these two tweets. Check the view counts. One tweet I posted on my private acct less than 1 min ago already has 59 views pic.twitter.com/cNVrRWCZ4u
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) February 9, 2023
The numerous people who used to manage that service haven’t been employed at Twitter since November, which has contributed to the chaos at the company.
As one current employee stated, “As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart.’ It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”
With so much turmoil at Twitter, it’s no wonder that Elon Musk is concerned about the performance of the platform he spent billions to acquire.
Whether he will be able to turn things around remains to be seen, but it’s clear that he will have his work cut out for him.
