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Even Elon Is Testing The New Twitter Engagement Hack (Spoiler: Going Private) That's Hot In The Streets

I swear to Christ, if I see one more "like if you can see this post" post on Twitter, I am going to rip off Jack Dorsey's beard and shove it up his ass for inventing Twitter.

That said... hand up, my account is now private, and I am doing numbies. Also, I'm not going to lie, I was today years old when I found out that you could make your account private. And I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to figure out how to do it.

I'll just leave this right here: How to protect and unprotect your Tweets

In case you're wondering "wtf is he talking about?"... Twitter users found a glitch in the matrix. Basically, if you set your account to private (only your followers see your posts) engagement moons. Rumors have been bubbling for a few days. Then, yesterday Elon went private to "troubleshoot" the issue. A real man of the people.

Mashable - Have you noticed that some of your favorite Twitter users locked their accounts over the past day or two? 

Perhaps the most obvious case of a Twitter user that went private recently is none other than the platform's owner, Elon Musk. With more than 127 million followers, Musk didn't exactly go private in order to hide his tweets from the public.

No, Musk locked his account to test if the Twitter algorithm has gone awry. Here's what's happening.

Over the past month or so, many Twitter users have noticed a stark change in their Twitter feeds. Shortly after Musk took over, users began seeing all sorts of random tweets filling up their For You feeds from accounts they weren't following or had never interacted with. Musk himself acknowledged the issue and chalked it up to an algorithm update which had been fixed. 

Word began to spread that users were seeing more engagement, such as likes and retweets, when they had locked their accounts, which essentially makes their tweets private and only visible to their current followers. Normally, an account would see less engagement when going private as doing this essentially blocks users from being able to retweet your posts.

This is almost as much fun as that time Robinhood users found out their accounts had infinite leverage. Take me back...

But I'm not sitting here telling you this because I want you to have fun with this information. No, my goal is for you to use this to acquire more of the only currency that really matters in this world: likes and comments. 

So, I implore you to not share this with anyone and squeeze ever single last like and comment that you can out of this before the nerds at Twitter ruin it for us.

PS - Every day I send The Water Coolest, Barstool's daily business and markets newsletter. It hits your inbox at 6 AM and covers all stories you need to know (not just Twitter news). 

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