Twitter to tackle flaws spotted in Musk’s test

Elon Musk’s test to see how locking his account affected the engagement on his posts helped to identify “issues with the system” that the company will address by next week, he said in a tweet on Thursday.

Twitter’s CEO locked his account early on Wednesday after users of the social media site claimed that setting an account to private dramatically improved the number of likes and views their tweets received. He unlocked it about 24 hours later.

Commentator Ian Miles Cheong tweeted on Tuesday the results of a test indicating that a tweet sent when his account was set to private had a far greater reach than the same tweet posted when his account was set to public. Musk responded that this was “extremely concerning” and later pledged to conduct his own experiment.

“Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you see my private tweets more than my public ones,” he tweeted shortly after 6am London time.

It is the latest in a series of experiments Musk has conducted since he bought Twitter for $44bn in late October, which included using a Twitter poll to ask people if he should stay on as CEO and switching the timeline to default to an algorithmic feed.