• Seeing more of Musk than you’d like in the Twitter For You tab? That’s seemingly by-design.
• Lower than expected engagement on one tweet prompted the billionaire to direct his Twitter engineers to solve the problem.
• That solution was reportedly to bypass filters and showcase Musk’s tweets to all users, regardless of their interests.

Have you been seeing a lot more of Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk on your For You tab on Twitter? It appears as if this isn’t some mistake or bug, it’s by design.

Yes the man who spent $44 billion to make a 420 joke is rather upset that his tweets aren’t getting the engagement he feels he ought to receive. As reported by The Platformer (a blog run by Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer) Twitter staffers have been forced to artificially boost Musk’s reach.

This is according to sources familiar with the matter and documents sent to The Platformer.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” James Musk, the owner’s cousin, reportedly wrote in the Twitter’s Slack early on Monday morning. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

The matter that required urgent attention at 2:36 AM on a Monday morning was simple – Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl received 9.1 million impressions while US President Joe Biden’s tweet about the same subject received 29 million impressions. Poor fella.

This reportedly upset the billionaire so much that he charted his private jet to return to San Francisco after Kansas City Chiefs beat the Philadelphia Eagles to demand answers from his team.

With threats of dismissal allegedly hanging over the heads of Twitter’s engineers, a system was reportedly put in place that would boost his engagement.

While engineers worked to triage the “problem” a number of theories were bandied about. One was that Musk was simply being blocked and muted by users because they had grown weary of him and his antics.

To solve this, engineers at Twitter deployed code that would automatically “greenlight” his tweets so that they bypass the relevancy parameters for all users. Essentially, even if Musk isn’t in your sphere of interest, you will see tweets from him – including replies – in the For You tab of the app.

This may end up hurting the billionaire’s engagement more than it helps because there is one sure fire way to stop Musk from appearing on your timeline – blocking the account.

Since Tuesday afternoon, #BlockElon has been trending and Twitter users are posting their receipts of exactly that. Truth be told, this isn’t likely to be too much of a pain for users as they can simply view tweets of a user that they have blocked. One can also just open up a new Incognito tab and key in Musk’s Twitter URL and see his tweets without even being logged into the website. We do wonder how this will affect Twitter as a whole though.

Musk is clearly okay with making sweeping changes to the platform whether they negatively affect users or not. Only when his fans exhibit push back do those changes get walked back.

What happens next is unclear but we would be alarmed – although not entirely shocked – to learn that the block function is being removed from Twitter on the back of this.

Ultimately, Musk can do what he wants with the platform because he did spend $44 billion to acquire it outright. With that having been said, the billionaire may want to look to Instagram as regards pushing out updates to users’ feeds and note how poorly those have gone down in the past.