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Why suddenly are Twitter feeds flooded with Elon Musk’s tweets?

Since Elon Musk acquired the social media platform in October, users of Twitter have been paying closer attention to him. It seems like some people can only see Musk on Twitter right now.

Some Twitter users discovered on Monday that, with the exception of the occasional promotional message, their “For You” feeds on the social media platform were stuffed with tweets and responses from the tech mogul, some of which were several days old.

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Image Source: businessinsider.in

People complained that recent tweets from accounts that don’t follow Musk were flooding their feeds. In a tweet sent out early on Tuesday, Musk appeared to recognize the problem, writing: “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm’.”

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Musk tweeted on Sunday that he had worked hard all day long at Twitter headquarters with the technical team to fix two problems. First off, up to 95% of his tweets were not delivered at all since the “Fanout service” for the “Following” feed was overloaded when he tweeted. Several users’ queued tweets were also ruined by this problem.

Second, the Recommendation method used an absolute block count rather than a percentage block count, which resulted in the deletion of accounts with a large number of followers even when blocks represented only 0.1% of followers and made it “simple” to bot spam profiles with blocks.

This change comes in response to Musk’s criticism that his tweets were not getting enough views, which led him to temporarily make his account private and even sack an engineer because of it. It appears that a number of right-wing profiles that Musk engages with also saw a decrease in their reach as a result of some algorithmic modifications made by Twitter.

The oddity occurs less than a week after users of the social network reported a number of widespread issues affecting their use of the platform on February 8. Users lost access to direct messages, received error messages stating they were “over the daily limit for sending tweets,” and had to schedule tweets before posting them.

The same day, Twitter made the announcement that it will begin charging $100 each month for a “basic tier” to utilize its API, which programmers and researchers use to examine public tweets.

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On February 10, Twitter also made it possible for US Twitter Blue members to send tweets with 4,000 characters instead of the standard 280.

Many who use the network have taken offense at Musk’s decision to charge for services that are generally free, particularly because the modifications are made quickly and without much notice. In an attempt to give users the coveted blue checkmark, Twitter launched an upgraded verification system last year, but it failed.

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