• Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s, prompting Musk to fly back to the Bay Area to demand answers from his team.
• Engineers worked through the night to investigate why Musk’s tweets weren’t performing as well as they should.
• They discovered that Musk had been blocked and muted by many people, and that Twitter’s system had been promoting other users’ tweets over his.
• To fix the issue, they deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, boosting them by a factor of 1,000 and bypassing Twitter’s filters.
• This caused an uproar, and Musk acknowledged it with a meme. The artificial boosts remain in place, although the factor is now lower than 1,000.
• The incident highlights the tension between why some posts are more popular than others, and the difficulty of understanding why people see certain things and not others.
• Google previewed Privacy Sandbox, its answer to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency.
• Instagram will shut down its live shopping feature in March.
• Meta updated the “Why am I seeing this ad?” feature on Facebook to include information about how the company uses machine learning to analyze users’ behavior.
• Andy Jassy says Amazon is doubling down on the company’s grocery store business despite slow growth.
• Spotify removed a clause that let Apple use human voices from Findaway Voices to train Apple’s machine-learning systems.
• Twitter and other big companies are cutting Slack and Salesforce contracts.
• The NFT market been inching back up, with sales on the ethereum blockchain jumping from $546.9 million in December to $780.2 million in January.
• BuzzFeed launched “infinity quizzes,” letting users build personalized narratives using technology from OpenAI.
Published February 15, 2023
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