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Manufactured consensus on x.com

rook2root.co

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Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#151
post #64
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.

The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President. The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in conten…

Harris was pretty much the only option. The primary was already over and there were real questions on who could spend campaign funds with Biden's step down.

That said, I really blame her lose on her and the biden campaign more than anything. They chased hard for disaffected republican voters at the expense of the base. They failed to win those voters and lost some of their base voters.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#152
post #123

The article’s angst over X’s “manufactured consensus” is overblown. Influence has always been curated—editors, town criers, or whoever grabbed the mic were the analog algorithms. X’s sin isn’t some evil algo: it’s just running at planetary scale. We’ve ditched thousands of small communities for one global shouting match, so naturally mega-influencers steal the show. Algorithms are just the gears keeping this chaos mo…

But there is no denying that there is a shift in narrative in X posts since its acquisition. So there is certainly more going on than just planetary scale. It was planetary scale before acquisition too. Algorithms have the power to nudge the narrative one way or another at planetary scale.

It was completely transparent and unbiased before its acquisition.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#153
post #149

> When an account with 219 million followers interacts with a smaller one — not by blocking or arguing, but simply by muting — the consequences are immediate. The smaller account’s visibility drops from 150,000 views to 20,000 overnight. Is this true on Twitter/X? If so, what is the rationale?

Lots of people report those kinds of massive deboosting and visibility penalties, and constantly devising avoidance strategies. There are no trivially inferred rationale as with lots of things going on in the world, unless destruction of value were the goal.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#155

It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are spammed by hate bots and then making those posts visible. https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk... I've also seen evidence of posts Twitter likes (violent and hateful anti-immigration posts - literally a photo of a dummy tied to a chair being shot in the back of the head) being spammed by love bots. Twitter seems to be a propaganda chann…

It's a propaganda platform since Musk bought it. Im saying this for ages and never joked. Plenty of real situations happening like blocking certain people, stoping of fact checking, bot protection and detection etc. There is a reason why Twitter needed more people before

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Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is no denying that there is a shift in narrative in X posts since its acquisition. So there is certainly more going on than just planetary scale. It was planetary scale before acquisition too. Algorithms have the power to nudge the narrative one way or another at planetary scale.

It was completely transparent and unbiased before its acquisition.

It was a little right wing biased. Now the bias moved a lot to the right.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is no denying that there is a shift in narrative in X posts since its acquisition. So there is certainly more going on than just planetary scale. It was planetary scale before acquisition too. Algorithms have the power to nudge the narrative one way or another at planetary scale.

It was completely transparent and unbiased before its acquisition.

I can't quite tell if this is sarcasm :). I'll assume it is.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#158
post #36

It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies. We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion…

It's hard to see how this wasn't by design. Elon loudly released the source code to the algorithm so SEO engineers could optimize their systems to have total control over the narrative. Sure "anybody can read it", but realistically only propagandists are going to go to the trouble and then have the time and resources to act on it.

He basically handed the site over to the IRA and told them to go nuts.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v... Tha…

AKA the “Nazi bar” problem. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar

One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps, how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech absolutism that has been abused.

In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end.

During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned.

Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech".

And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself.

Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them.

[0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules.

[1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow.

See also https://xkcd.com/898/

[2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#160
In this modern era we heave under the weight of decades of exponential growth. In some cases it’s actually “only” compound growth - but the result has been the same (and very ironic): ossification through stratification.

There are behemoths living among us. There will soon be social media accounts with enough sway to manufacture truth.

What needs to be learned is society is like a national park. Left to its own devices it will end up trashed - people leave garbage, move in and use it for whatever they like. So, we fund a service that keeps parks maintained. We understand the benefits of the National Park Service because they are visible and we are visual creatures. But for some reason we have a more laissez-faire attitude to unchecked accumulation and its downstream effects.

It’s risky for power to be so concentrated. We’re forced to hope for benevolence and there’s no backup plan.

What more can be done to show the orders of magnitude of difference between the most and least powerful?

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