Twitter crosses 8 billion user minutes per day: Elon Musk

“This platform is growing fast! Just exceeded 8 billion user-minutes per day … of the most influential, smartest people on Earth,” Musk tweeted.

This comes at a time when Twitter and Musk are making efforts to shore up the revenue of the platform from different sources as advertising dollars continue to dwindle.

Earlier this month, Musk said the messaging service makes about 5 or 6 cents per hour of attention from users and could raise that to 15 cents or more with advertisements that are more relevant and timely.

Detecting manipulation

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Amid growing chatter about artificial intelligence, Twitter owner Elon Musk on Saturday announced that the micro-blogging platform will use AI to detect “manipulation of public opinion”.

“In the months ahead, we will use AI to detect & highlight manipulation of public opinion on this platform. Let’s see what the psy ops cat drags in …” Musk tweeted.

The announcement follows Twitter’s scrutiny over the lack of content moderation on the platform since the billionaire took over in October last year. Twitter has since executed several rounds of layoffs and is reportedly running on a skeleton staff, leaving it vulnerable to outages, disinformation, and harmful content.

Advertisers too have deserted Twitter, prompting Musk to look for other ways to monetise such as subscription-based services.

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that European Union has directed Musk to hire more human moderators and fact-checkers to review posts on Twitter. Twitter has been leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews. The FT report said it does not employ fact checkers, unlike larger rivals Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

Meanwhile, Musk also announced that he will make public the long-secret algorithm for recommending tweets.

Twitter will open source all the codes used to recommend tweets on March 31, Musk said in a tweet.