Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

Elon Musk says he’s against a “lords and peasants” system on Twitter.

And he thinks celebrities on the platform should be treated equal:

And he’s really mad about shadowbanning:

Even as he uses the shadowban features all the time, mainly against accounts he dislikes.

But now it turns out that, all along, he’s set up a special “shadow boosting” system, that allows him to pump his own personal favorite accounts into your algorithmically generated “for you” feed all the time.

Now, we already know that Elon’s own tweets got the “max boost” treatment from engineers after Elon had a sad over a Joe Biden tweet getting more engagement. But we were told that was a special treatment just to keep the guy in charge happy.

However, it probably won’t surprise most of you to know that there’s also a special list of “VIPs” whose tweets are boosted to appear in people’s feeds basically all the time. And the folks at Platformer got their hands on the list.

But Twitter does have a different standard for celebrities – including Musk himself. For months, the platform has maintained a list of around 35 VIP users whose accounts it monitors and offers increased visibility alongside Elon Musk, according to documents obtained by Platformer. The list, which spans the political gamut and also includes several journalists and celebrities, includes:

• NBA All-Star LeBron James
• Daily Wire founder and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro
• Pseudonymous conservative commentator @catturd2
• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY
• President Joe Biden
• YouTube star MrBeast 
• Venture capitalist and Twitter investor Marc Andreessen
• Weird Twitter pioneer @dril
• Comedian Jaboukie Young-White
• Tesla community account @teslaownerssv
• Journalists Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald, Noah Smith, and Adrian Wojnarowski

(Platformer is not publishing the full list, whose makeup has changed slightly over time, to protect our sources’ identities. All the names above are still on the list.)

Menswear writer Derek Guy, aka @dieworkwear, is also on the list, which could explain why many of his posts went inexplicably viral earlier this year. 

That sure seems to go against his “no lords and peasants” dual class system, or his Shatner spat about treating everyone equally, but since when has Elon ever been honest about anything?

I’ve seen some people surprised at who is on this list, but it primarily seems like a list of people that Elon thinks drive engagement.

In the meantime, there are some other changes happening at Twitter as well, including firing more of the remaining trust & safety team, and handing over more power to the very same AI that Musk seems to spend every day on Twitter mocking as dangerous. I’m sure that’ll work out great:

In an effort to save money, Twitter is scaling back its content moderation team even further, and relying more heavily on automated systems to police content than ever before.

Still, perhaps even bigger is Musk’s new plan, which is hilarious in just how much it demonstrates how little Musk understands about how Twitter works for everyone but himself. He announced that only people who pay (which he falsely calls “verified”) will show in the “for you” algorithmic feed that Elon’s Twitter now forces on every user when they open up Twitter, whether they like it or not:

I mean, almost all of this is hilarious. First, it makes the “for you” feed even more ridiculous and less valuable to users, meaning that it actually devalues the benefits of paying for Twitter Blue. Basically, it now means that appearing in the “for you” feed means you’re a chump.

But, once again, he’s creating a “lords and peasants” scenario, where the “lords” are simply those people gullible enough to pay Elon Musk a monthly fee.

Still, more importantly, the idea that he thinks this is the “only realistic way” of dealing with “AI bot swarms” really says a lot, and none of it good. First off, Elon had already claimed that he (1) took over Twitter to get rid of the bots and had such a good plan to do so that (2) he claimed the problem was already taken care of back in December, which he accomplished by… shutting off access to big telecom providers in India, Russia and Indonesia, and accidentally blocking a bunch of legit Twitter accounts.

Guess not.

Also, for scammers who are willing to pay $8, they’ll now have a clearer field to do their scamming, which could easily be worth more than $8 to the scammers.

And, yeah, the voting in polls thing: I mean, what? Most people are assuming that he’s still bitter about “losing” the poll about whether or not he should step down as CEO, which he promised to abide by even as it’s unclear that he’s taken any steps towards that end result. Even if it were true that “AI bot swarms” were polluting polls… so what? These polls mostly don’t matter.

To be fair, he also seems to be claiming that these new bots are “AI bot swarms” that have figured out how to bypass CAPTCHAs.

So, this seems to be his — I guess some might call it “strategy?” — for dealing with this. This is just one step short of saying that you can’t tweet unless you pay, which… will just drive a huge segment of the Twitter userbase away from Twitter.

If there’s one consistent thing we’ve seen with Elon is that he seems simply incapable of considering literally anyone else’s experience on his site beyond himself. Every single move has been about improving his personal experience on Twitter, usually at the expense of everyone else’s.

He bans accounts that make him feel uncomfortable.

He tweaks the algorithm to promote his own content.

He changes the rules to protect his friends and friends of friends while banning people his friends dislike.

He attacks and ridicules those who challenge him.

It’s just consistently about his own world. So now he’s promoting tweets of people he likes, while making sure that the “algorithm” that he sees every time he logs in is only filled with fans so obsessed with Musk they’re willing to pay him a monthly fee to tweet in his general direction.

That’s… one way to run a social media network. But it doesn’t seem like a very good one.