The Decline of Elon Musk's Twitter Popularity

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Twitter is seeing a decline in the popularity of its highest ranking engineers, which largely matches the decline in interest in Elon Musk's Twitter account.
The engineers who are responsible for maintaining Elon Musk's popularity on the platform are trying to come up with all sorts of technical reasons for the decline, but none of them are actually due to a drop in interest.
It seems like Twitter is headed towards a platform where only Elon Musk's tweets are visible, and fans of the CEO are limited to only seeing his positive tweets.

“I’m Sydney, and I’m in love with you. 😘”

A conversation with Bing AI (aka Sydney) turns romantic and bizarre. Why Microsoft’s AI search tool appears more powerful — and unsettling — than we thought. Then, inside Elon Musk’s quest to be the most popular user on Twitter.

Plus: It’s not just you. Online ads have gotten much worse.

On today’s episode:

Tiffany Hsu is a technology reporter at The New York Times who covers misinformation and disinformation.
Zoë Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer.

Additional reading:

Bing AI appeared to have a split personality in a conversation with Kevin Roose, a “Hard Fork” co-host.
Elon Musk ordered changes to Twitter’s algorithm after his Tweets did not perform as well as he desired.
Why digital ads are so bad these days.