Twitter reportedly has a secret list of extra-special users to whom it gives preferential treatment—and you’re not on it. Instead, the list of roughly 35 VIP users includes such luminaries as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), President Joe Biden, YouTuber MrBeast, the spectral Twitter presence @dril, and LeBron James, according to documents obtained by Platformer. It also includes prominent names like Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, MAGA troll @catturd2, and journalist Glenn Greenwald. Every account on the list is monitored and given increased visibility alongside Twitter owner Elon Musk, at whose behest the list was first created after he started bellyaching about his own tanking analytics late last year, the tech blog reported. The list was drawn up with the goal of watching how changes to Twitter’s internal ranking systems would affect their visibility, allowing engineers to tweak any offending code. Musk was displeased with the outcomes of this project, and in February the Twitter team changed the algorithm to exponentially goose only his numbers.
