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Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover | FRONTLINE
FRONTLINE traces Elon Musk’s long and often troubled relationship with Twitter.
www.pbs.org
ZOË SHIFFER:
And he tweets out basically his support for the Philadelphia Eagles. I think his tweet was something like, "Go Eagles" with a few American flags on it. Biden, around the same time, posts a somewhat similar tweet. "Fly, Eagles, fly," and it's a video of his wife, Jill Biden, who's walking with an Eagles jersey on. The game goes on. Elon Musk checks his phone. Weird. It looks like Joe Biden, who he's called "a damp sock puppet in human form," is doing much better than he is in terms of engagement on this very similar tweet.
JAMES JACOBY:
Zoë Schiffer and her colleague at Platformer spoke to multiple sources at Twitter about what happened next.
ZOË SHIFFER:
By the end of the game, the Eagles lose and Elon is completely furious. Something is going on with his account, in his mind. And so he gets on his jet. He flies straight back to Twitter's office in San Francisco.
JAMES JACOBY:
At 2:36 a.m., she says an urgent message went out, and roughly 80 engineers were pulled into work.
ZOË SHIFFER:
And they're tasked with fixing the issues with the algorithm. What the engineers decide to do is reconfigure the algorithm so that Elon Musk's account is boosted.
Very quickly, we're able to talk to people who were in the room at the time and were working on these algorithmic changes. And the reason that people are talking to us is that people are pissed at this point.
JAMES JACOBY:
The effect was immediate.
MALE REPORTER:
If you use Twitter and you feel like you’ve been seeing a lot of Elon Musk lately, you’re not crazy.
MALE REPORTER:
The entire "For You" feed was just Elon Musk.
SARAH SILVERMAN:
Because it behooves all of us to be privy to the fresh and original insights of the richest man in the world.
ZOË SHIFFER:
I was seeing so much Elon. And then I tweeted, "Is anyone else's 'For You' tab just Elon Musk today?" And it was hundreds of people were like, "Yes, what is happening?"
