Desperate for people to like him, archvillain Elon Musk refused to accept the fact that Twitter users had tired of his antics, believing instead that the platform he owns was actively suppressing his reach, Platformer News reports. After one of the company’s top two engineers explained that the underlying analytics and data–as well as an audit of the algorithm–verified it was a drop in audience engagement and not a conspiracy to silence him, Musk fired the engineer abruptly because he did not believe him saying, “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Musk is facing continued skepticism about his management of the social media platform, with usage down at least 9% since his takeover. Musk’s vow to be transparent has apparently backfired on him: a new feature showing how many people have actually seen individual tweets has led to heavy users realizing their posts are not generating the views they once did. Random advertising and posts from people not followed by the user led to vocal dissatisfaction with Musk’s leadership.
A recent outage in service in which users were informed that they had reached their tweet limit was reported caused by an employee who had deleted key files for an internal service that monitors posting rates to detect spam and other malicious actors. Musk had fired the team that oversaw that internal service.