Elon Musk locks his Twitter account to test engagement impact

Elon Musk temporarily locked his Twitter account in the early hours of Wednesday morning, in an effort to check whether it would affect engagement on his tweets.

Twitter Inc.’s chief executive officer was responding to users of the social media site who claimed that setting an account to private dramatically improved the reach of their tweets.

Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong tweeted on Tuesday the results of a test indicating that a tweet sent when his account was set to private received many more likes and views than the same tweet posted when his account was set to public. Musk responded that this was “extremely concerning” and later pledged to conduct his own experiment.

“Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you see my private tweets more than my public ones,” he tweeted shortly after 6:00 a.m. London time.

It’s the latest in a series of experiments Musk has conducted since he bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October, which included using a Twitter poll to ask people if he should stay on as CEO and switching the timeline to default to an algorithmic feed.