https://onezero.medium.com/the-machine-behind-twitters-strangest-promoted-tweets-1584ba041b74

Illustration: Shira InbarWhen Ryan Downey signed up to automatically promote his tweets, he thought he was doing himself a favor.

Downey, a freelance journalist who joined Twitter in 2007, had previously experimented with the platform’s traditional method of advertising: promoting specific tweets to a tailored audience. He mostly did so because he wanted to publicize his stories, but he found the traditional approach wasn’t particularly effective. And so, when he received an invitation in 2017 to try a service called Promote Mode—through which Twitter would automatically promote his tweets—he went along with it. He assumed the platform would know better than anyone which tweets to highlight.