A Twitter engineer said he was the employee that was fired by CEO Elon Musk after refusing to "artificially inflate his view counts."
The engineer, who goes by the name "jordan," said he turned down the request from Musk, who bought the social media company last October for $44 billion, to increase the number of view counts for his personal account.
"This was me, my 6.5-year stint at Twitter comes to an end today," he tweeted. "Proud of the work we did and have full confidence the three or four people left will be able to honor Elon’s requests to artificially inflate his view counts (and view counts for advertisers). Not me though."
A request for comment from Jordan did not receive an immediate reply.
Twitter has lost advertisers, users and ad revenue since Musk took the company private.
Advertisers backed away from Twitter after Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla (TSLA), allowed accounts that were previously banned and tweeted problematic or racist comments.
Musk's latest focus has been on his view counts, which is how many people can see the tweets he posts.
On Feb. 7, Musk pushed for answers and asked the engineering team why his engagement numbers had declined.
He said that he should have more than "tens of thousands of impressions" since he has over 100 million followers, Platformer reported, citing several sources.
Out of the two remaining principal engineers that had not been fired in 2022 by Musk, one said that the likely culprit was that the public had started to lose interest in his incessant, late night tweets.
Musk was shown data that detailed the amount of engagement on his Twitter account. Data from a Google Trends chart was also provided, according to Platformer's article.
The billionaire, who was once the richest man in the world and now ranks second, had a score of "100" in terms of popularity last April.
But Musk fell from the peak popularity ranking and now has a score of only nine.
Engineers looked into the cause of the low ranking and said the algorithm was not working against him.
Musk took the news badly and retaliated immediately. He fired the engineer, who is likely Jordan.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” he reportedly told the engineer.
The fired engineer was not named by Platformer since Musk has often show disdain for his current and former employees.
One employee said that Musk told engineers to keep count of the number of times his tweets are recommended to other Twitter users.
Seven weeks ago Twitter added a feature to every tweet - users can see the public view counts.
Musk touted the new feature of how well the platform is performing.
“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.
But not all users were fans of the new feature and the impact Musk sought has not occurred, The view counts have actually shown the small size of engagement compared to the audience size.
A recent study shows usage in the U.S. fell by nearly 9% since Musk took the company private.
The new feature could be the source of why engagement is down, some employees at Twitter told Platformer.
Twitter has had other problems with its timeline and how tweets appear, tweets showing up from accounts that users do not follow and other changes that users of the social media platform have complained about since Musk purchased the company.
A major outage occurred on Feb. 8 and users were told over and over again that “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” The team that set rate limits for using the platform left in November and an employee had accidentally deleted the data used for that service.
Musk went into debt to the tune of $13 billion to finance the acquisition and his attempts to make Twitter profitable as soon as possible have not succeeded.
He admitted that allowing the microblogging website a bastion of Republicans and conservatives who felt they had been muzzled by Twitter 1.0. was a costly mistake since many advertisers suspended their ads. Advertising is the main source of revenue for Twitter, representing 91% of revenue in the second quarter of 2022, the last period for which the data is public.
Now the second richest man in the world has been attempting to reinvent Blue, the paid subscription service of the platform. He decided to integrate the blue checkmark, a sign that the identity of the holder of an account was verified, to Blue. In doing so, he had raised the price of Blue to $7.99 per month, excluding iPhone owners who must pay $11 per month.
In addition to this check mark, subscribers to Blue also have new features, including the possibility of editing a tweet.
The checkmark was free under Twitter 1.0. At the time, it was awarded to companies, public figures, influencers, entities, institutions and journalists.
Musk also decided to differentiate individuals from companies and institutions and politicians. The check mark remains blue for individuals but is now gray for institutions and politicians and finally gold for companies. According to The Information, Twitter considered charging companies and brands $1,000 per month for the famous gold checkmark. The move is part of a new payment plan for businesses.
The program, which is called "Verified for Organization," includes charging business accounts $1,000 per month if they want to stay verified. Any affiliate accounts under the bigger corporate account will cost an additional $50/month.
Twitter recently sent emails to businesses and brands telling them about the program.
"We're now opening the gates for early access to our Organization plan," a Twitter executive wrote to a brand on Feb. 2, according to an email posted on the platform. "As an early access subscriber, you'll get a gold checkmark for your organization and affiliation badges for its associates."
