This illustration photo taken on 30 January 2023 shows a phone screen displaying a tweet from Elon Musk's Twitter account. Photo: AFP/Olivier Doulivier
If you used Twitter in the past 48 hours, you might have been one of the unlucky tweeps bombarded by a stream of Elon Musk’s tweets.
While some might think this was a mere bug or a website gremlin, more sinister motives were afoot, if widespread reporting is anything to go by.
I was hoping to have a chilled evening scrolling through Twitter (if such a thing even exists), when suddenly my For You feed was filled with Musk’s pearls of wisdom (again, if such things even exist).
First, it was “an empty browser history says more than a full one”, before going off about how Tesla’s Investor Day will be “a message of good hope and positivity for the future.”
Even as I write this, Musk’s activity is still cluttering up my feed.
I enjoy Musk’s snark as much as the next person – he can be entertaining when he wants to be – but it now raises the question: Did Elon Musk buy Twitter just to force-feed us his thoughts and opinions?
Because if this is the case, it goes beyond normal attention-seeking behaviour.
According to The Verge [1], which has inside information from people familiar with the incident, engineers were summoned shortly before 3am local time on Monday to deal with “an engagement issue.”
Musk’s cousin, James, logged into the company Slack and reportedly posted the following message:
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform. Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency.”
The issue? Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl was allegedly getting less engagement than President Joe Biden’s tweet.
Biden’s tweet garnered almost 29 million impressions while Musk’s tweet, also in support of the Eagles, only generated a measly 9.1 million impressions.
Impressions are the number of appearances, not the number of individual people who see your content. For example, if one person sees the tweet 10 times, it’s 10 impressions.
And since this is a metric Musk has been obsessed with lately, this raging ego tornado seemingly reached boiling point when he was outshone by Biden.
Of course, if a person of Musk’s stature and importance is pissed off, it reverberates around the internet and the world, and I have to hand it to The Verge’s Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton, who succinctly said:
“Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident.
“Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.”
Musk, of course, came up with some excuse about an engineering fault and how the For You feed was “getting overloaded when I tweeted, resulting in up to 95% of my tweets not getting delivered at all.”
That in itself is already a red flag, but I guess that’s a discussion for another day.
During this debacle, the hashtag ‘Elon Musk is a troll’ was also trending, which lead me down an even deeper rabbit hole of WTF-ery.
ALSO READ: Hey Elon, no one cares about Twitter Blue
A study done back in 2011 [2] examined how narcissism as a personality trait was marked by self-promotion, vanity and grandiosity.
Since narcissistic people have an inflated self-concept and seek attention, the researchers predicted those individuals would draw attention to themselves online via self-promoting and using aggressive language.
The findings suggest narcissistic people regulate their self-esteem by compensating through other means when they do not draw attention to themselves using what we consider ‘normal’ language.
Would paying $44 billion for a company which generated over $270 million in net losses in Q2 2022) [3] – only to later promote your own tweets because the president of the US of A count outperformed you – be an example of narcissism in the digital age?
You decide.
Pity Musk wasn’t as active on Twitter and social media back then, it would likely have cut their research time in half.
Meanwhile, another study in 2015, [4] specifically looked at how people communicate about themselves online, and how netizens perceive online trolls.
In the first study, people rated the different characteristics of online trolls, which came down to five main aspects, or a combination thereof:
In the second study, they showed people examples of online trolling and asked them to rate it based on those five characteristics, while the third study consisted of a questionnaire to measure their thoughts about online trolls.
They found if people thought of trolls as seeking attention or conflict, they were less affected by other trolling incidents.
So there you have it, folks. Musk’s excessive tweeting and need for attention serves a purpose, after all – it will make us more resilient to trolling and less affected by negative interactions online.
ALSO READ: Not even Musk could fix Eskom – Is De Ruyter leaving the world’s worst job?
[1] Schiffer, Z. Newton, C. (2023). Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first. The Verge, 15 February 2023.
[2] C. Nathan DeWall, Laura E. Buffardi, Ian Bonser, W. Keith Campbell, (2011). Narcissism and implicit attention seeking: Evidence from linguistic analyses of social networking and online presentation, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 51, Issue 1, Pages 57-62; 31 March 2011.
[3] Daniel, W. (2022). Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter purchase is ‘one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history’, Fortune, 27 October 2022.
[4] Maltby, J. Day, L. Hatcher, R.M. Tazzyman, S. Flowe H.D. Palmer, E.J. Frosch, C.A. O’Reilly, M. Jones, C. Buckley, C. Knieps, M. Cutts, K. (2015), Implicit theories of online trolling: Evidence that attention-seeking conceptions are associated with increased psychological resilience, British Journal of Psychology, Volume 107, Issue 3, p448-466, 25 September 2015.
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