Elon Musk Warns Twitter Users, 'You Are Being Manipulated by the Algorithm'

Twitter's potential new owner just made this announcement to his 93.1 million followers. 'Very important to fix your Twitter feed,' the annoncement began:

1. Tap home button.
2. Tap stars on upper right of screen.
3. Select 'Latest tweets'.

You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don't realize.

Easy to switch back & forth to see the difference.

Currently it's been pinned to the top of Elon Musk's Twitter feed. And minutes later, he added this reply to his own tweet. 'This message brought to you by the Illuminaughty.'

Hours later Musk posted some clarification. 'I'm not suggesting malice in the algorithm, but rather that it's trying to guess what you might want to read and, in doing so, inadvertently manipulate/amplify your viewpoints without you realizing this is happening.

'Not to mention potential bugs in the code. Open source is the way to go to solve both trust and efficacy.'

Musk's motivation isn't clear — but just minutes earlier he'd tweeted a reply to own tweet from Friday that had suggested Twitter users check a sample of 100 Twitter accounts for the percentage of fake/spam/duplicate accounts. 'I picked 100 as the sample size number,' Musk had added as a reply Friday, 'because that is what Twitter uses to calculate less than 5% fake/spam/duplicate.' Musk's follow-up tweet today?

'Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100! This actually happened.'

The tweets follow three more from the last 24 hours which all apparently comment wryly on Musk's planned acquisition of Twitter. 'Whoever thought owning the libs would be cheap never tried to acquire a social media company!' Musk tweeted earlier this afternoon. 'At least, that's what the lib hivemind thinks haha.'

And an earlier tweet appeared to allude to his recently-expressed interest in the number of fake/spam accounts on Twitter. Friday night, Elon Musk tweeted:

'The bots are angry at being counted.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.