Social media cycles: How Musk is changing the Twitter experience

KATE CONGER

Elon Musk has declared he wants to transform Twitter into an all-inclusive app that people can use for payments, news and food orders.

“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Mr. Musk posted in October, weeks before completing a $44 billion acquisition of the social network. He later said Twitter could be like WeChat, the popular Chinese app that combines social media, instant messaging and payment services.

But nearly six months after Mr. Musk took over Twitter, his ambitions for the platform have remained mostly that — ambitions.

Although the billionaire has made dozens of tweaks to Twitter, they have largely been cosmetic. His changes have mostly affected the platform’s appearance, said Jane Manchun Wong, an independent software engineer who studies social apps.

Those updates include adding more symbols and metrics displayed with tweets, but Twitter’s main elements — making it a place to quickly share news and discuss live events — haven’t altered.

Still, users’ experiences are changing. That’s because the kinds of tweets that they see are being affected by Mr. Musk’s behind-the-scenes adjustments. He has tinkered with the algorithm that decides which posts are most visible, thrown out content moderation rules that ban certain kinds of tweets and changed a verification process that confirms the identities of users.

The upshot is a Twitter that looks similar to the way it always has, but that is clunkier and less predictable in what tweets are surfaced and seen, users said. In some cases, that has caused confusion. Even Twitter’s employees have expressed frustration.

Last month, Andrea Conway, a designer at Twitter, posted about the design changes, saying: “We know you hate it. We hate it too. We’re working on making it suck less.” The modifications, she added, could eventually make Twitter “completely unusable.”

So what looks different on Twitter now, and what are the changes underlying the tweaks?

The Newsfeed: The most notable difference is Twitter’s newsfeed, the stream of posts that people see when they open the app. Newsfeeds previously appeared as a single flow of posts, displaying tweets from only the accounts that a user followed.

Mr. Musk has cleaved the newsfeed into two. Now when users open Twitter’s app, they see an algorithmically curated “For You” feed, which mimics a popular feature on TikTok, and a “Following” tab. The “For You” newsfeed incorporates changes that Mr. Musk has made to Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, pulling in more tweets from people a user doesn’t follow and suggesting new topics and interests.

That also means users might see posts from all sorts of content creators whom they might not be interested in. At one point in February, the algorithm flooded users’ feeds with tweets from Mr. Musk.

Here’s how a user’s “For You” newsfeed might look, with an example of a tweet from an account that the user doesn’t follow and that the algorithm suggests. For users to see posts only from people they follow, they would have to switch to the “Following” tab.

Check Marks: Mr. Musk has also modified Twitter by adding a flood of colour-coded check marks, which belie a deeper change to how the platform confirms the identities of organisations, governments, notable individuals and other official accounts.