Musk: Elon Musk may have fired Twitter employee for saying his popularity is declining – Times of India

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been investigating why the social media platform’s algorithm is restricting reach for certain accounts. Earlier this month, he took his account ‘private’ for a day after another user said doing so helped increase tweet visibility. Following that, Musk tweeted, “This helped identify some issues with the system. Should be addressed by next week.”
The billionaire’s dissatisfaction with the algorithm was reportedly a subject of discussion in a recent meeting. As per a report by The Platformer, a senior employee was fired after he suggested Musk’s tweets were getting less views because his popularity was on the decline.

Musk found his lower-than-expected account reach to be “ridiculous”
As per the source, Musk expressed his surprise at his ‘low’ tweet views in a meeting with Twitter engineers and advisors. He said, “This is ridiculous … I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Employees gave him a reason he ‘didn’t like’, senior engineer got fired
Tasked with finding out the reason behind low impressions, engineers compared internal data with Google Trends figures. They highlighted that Musk’s online popularity had tanked drastically as it dropped from a ‘100’ score on Trends in April 2022 to a score of ‘9’ on that day.
Post this reasoning, Musk responded by firing a lead engineer. He said, “You’re fired, you’re fired.” An employee also told the source that the team has been assigned to track impressions of each of Musk’s tweets.

The ‘Views’ button may be the culprit
The impressions button aka ‘Views’ is a new feature Twitter recently made available. During its rollout, Musk announced in a tweet that the button “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.”
However, the source mentions that certain people at Twitter think the inclusion of the ‘Views’ button may be the reason for all this. Their argument is that decreasing the size of ‘like’ and ‘comment’ button to accommodate impressions may have led to less users engaging with the content, directly impacting the tweet’s reach.