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Tech billionaire Elon Musk has once again taken to using Twitter to criticise the platform itself. In a tweet posted earlier today, Musk gave tips to ‘fix’ users’ Twitter feed by asking them to change their feed to a reverse chronological order by selecting the “Latest Tweets’ option on their home screen. Musk also said that user “are being manipulated by the algorithm” in ways they do not recognise.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of the platform, replied to this tweet defending the algorithm, saying that it was just designed to save people time when they are away from the app for a while. A few hours later, Musk clarified his initial tweet by saying he wasn’t suggesting any malice in the algorithm.
This comes just days after Musk announced that his deal to take over Twitter was “temporarily on hold” while he waited for more details about the proportion of spam or fake accounts on the platform.
“Any sensible random sampling process is fine. If many people independently get similar results for % of fake/spam/duplicate accounts, that will be telling.I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate,” he added as a reply to the tweet announcing the status of the acquisition.
According to Musk, he later received a call from Twitter lawyers who told him that he has violated an NDA by revealing the fact that Twitter’s bot check sample size is 100.
