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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Technology
Josh Taylor

Twitter data appears to support claims new algorithm inflated reach of Elon Musk’s tweets, Australian researcher says

Elon Musk Twitter Inc. Timothy Graham United States Jill Biden Joe Biden
Illustration shows Elon Musk image on smartphone and printed Twitter logos
Dr Timothy Graham, who researches bot behaviour and other trends on social media, says he was able to track the boost on Musk’s tweet data via access to Twitter’s application program interface. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

Data collected by an Australian researcher via Twitter’s API appears to support media claims that the reach of the tweets of the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk have been artificially inflated.

On Wednesday, the tech news site Platformer reported 80 Twitter engineers had been engaged to tweak the platform’s algorithm after Musk noticed a tweet from the US president, Joe Biden, about the Super Bowl outperformed his own, despite Musk having more than three times the number of followers.

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