AP Photo/ Benjamin Fanjoy, File
Elon Musk accused “several major media sources” of falsely reporting he is boosting his own tweets on his platform, the Twitter head chalking things up to a bug in the system.
“Several major media sources incorrectly reported that my Tweets were boosted above normal levels earlier this week,” Musk tweeted on Friday. “A review of my Tweet likes & views over the past 6 months, especially as a ratio of followers, shows this to be false.”
According to Musk, a “bug” was fixed that caused tweet replies to have the “same prominence” as regular tweets. Musk replies to tweets fairly often.
To further prove his point, Musk claimed he couldn’t be boosting his own tweets because he has yet to get the amount of engagement he did when he joked about buying Coca Cola to get cocaine back in the soft drink.
“For example, despite having [less than] 40M fewer followers back then, I have yet to come anywhere close to this gem,” he said. The tweet received over 4.7 million likes and nearly 850,000 retweets.
One specific outlet called out by Musk was Platformer, which ran a report this week on how Musk was implementing a system that guaranteed his tweets would be seen first by users. Musk claimed the report was based on the words of a “disgruntled employee.”
“The ‘source’ of the bogus Platformer article is a disgruntled employee who had been on paid time off for months, had already accepted a job at Google and felt the need to poison the well on the way out,” he tweeted. “Twitter will be taking legal action against him.”
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