Twitter boss Elon Musk baffled millions of the social media giant’s users Wednesday after marking his account private; this means only those who already follow the billionaire (and those he now permits) can see his tweets. Those who do not (Musk has nearly 128 million followers on the platform) will see this message – ‘these tweets are protected. Only approved followers can see elon musk’s tweets. To request access, click follow’.
Why did the Tesla CEO lock his account? It wasn’t for greater privacy. He indicated it was a test to see if tweets from locked/private accounts had greater reach; Musk’s account is expected to be locked for 24 hours.
In response to a thread by the account Libs of TikTok, which claimed a locked/private account’s tweets have a ‘vast reach’, as compared to a public handle, Musk wrote, “Something is wrong.”
Other Twitter users tried out the theory and came to a similar conclusion – that views and interactions for private accounts spiked five times. One user wrote, “The people I follow, whom I have on notifications, only started showing up after I set my account to private.”
Meanwhile, some users mocked Musk for being unaware of the features of his own platform and not having enough engineers to explain it to him.
Last week, the tech billionaire had tweeted with a laughing emoji that he had changed his Twitter handle to ‘Mr. Tweet’ and now couldn’t reverse the change. He wrote, “Changed my name to Mr Tweet, now Twitter won’t let me change it back.”
Musk’s takeover of Twitter has resulted in chaos, particularly with respect to the verification process – which awarded recognised handles a ‘blue tick’.
On Sunday, England bowler Tom Curran found out that tick had been removed from his account and he took a jab at Musk, who has made the feature a paid one; users in India, for example, will have to pay over ₹700 per month for the tick and those who earlier had the tick but choose not to pay will lose that feature. “Is that the $7 Elon Musk thing? Haha that’s funny. Still hate twitter. Probs not come on for ages again…Bye,” Curran wrote.
