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The political effects of X's feed algorithm

werd.io

31–40 of 107 posts

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#31

"We need more funding into open protocols that decentralize algorithmic ownership; open platforms that give users a choice of algorithm and platform provider; and algorithmic transparency across our information ecosystem." This sounds like a call to separate the aggregation step from the content. Reasonable enough, but does it really address the root cause? Aren't we just as polarized in a world where there are dozen…

I’d hope people wouldn’t intentionally pick the political extremism feed if they had any other option (although it’s hard to say).

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#32

I honestly don't understand how or why people are using Twitter to keep up with the news. The only thing I use it for is to follow artists, and even that has been going down in recent weeks with most of my favorites moving over to BlueSky. Maybe I'm just a long-winded idiot, but the character limits barely let me have a conversation on either platform. How are people consuming news like this? It just baffles me how d…

My feed (UK based) seems to give me the major news stories well before the mainstream (BBC), and I'm taking days if not weeks in some cases. Now it could be that's how the mainstream decides to cover a particular story? What's worrying is when a story is all over X but isn't covered.

To give an example, the recent protests in Iran where being covered on X but the BBC was silent for weeks before finally covering the story (for a few days).

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#33

Underrated in X's changes is how blue checkmark users are shown first underneath popular tweets. Most people who pay for blue checkmarks are either sympathetic to Musk's ideology or indifferent. Many blue checkmark users are there to make money from engagement. The result is underneath any tweet that gets traction you will see countless blue checkmark users either saying something trolling for their side or engagemen…

I automatically tune out any blue checkmark post or reply and just assume it's an LLM responding to earn $.003

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#34

I deleted my account after many years when X recently made the Chronological Feed setting ephemeral, defaulting back to the Algorithmic Feed each time the page is refreshed. No away I'm going to let that level of outrage-baiting garbage even so much as flash before my eyes.

I just click "following" at the top and never see anything I didn't ask to see. It resets once every few months to the other tab which I assume is just the cookie setting expiring.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#35
post #2

And this is why the price for Twitter was, in the end, remarkably low.

Yeah, this was always the play looking back in hindsight. Like, I didn't get it, "why would you pay that kind of money for a web forum?!" It wasn't the forum that was important, Twitter (for better or worse) has wormed it's way into the fabric of American discourse. He was basically buying the ideological thermostat for the country and turning the dial to the right.

Or from the other perspective: Meta and Google have had their finger on the scale for more than a decade (along with old twitter).

In twitters case, you had regime officials directing censorship illegally through open emails and meetings.

It's no surprise that the needle moves right when you dial back the suppression of free expression even a little bit (X still censors plenty)

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#37
post #21

I honestly don't understand how or why people are using Twitter to keep up with the news. The only thing I use it for is to follow artists, and even that has been going down in recent weeks with most of my favorites moving over to BlueSky. Maybe I'm just a long-winded idiot, but the character limits barely let me have a conversation on either platform. How are people consuming news like this? It just baffles me how d…

You follow artists, and they are not tweeting their political opinions? Cool. I gave up on Twitter when everyone I followed kept adding politics. Even if I agreed with it, I just don't want to a marinade in the anger all day.

The one exception I think of is the guy from Technology Connections, who I stopped following because I got tired of seeing him in my feed complaining about something or other. And I've noticed he's been putting that into his videos as well, so I might have to do it on YouTube as well.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#38
I really wish these points were made in a non-political / platform-specific way because if you care about this issue it's ultimately unhelpful to frame it as if this is an issue with just X or conservatives given how politically divided people are.

I do share the author's concerns and was also concerned back in the day when Twitter was quite literally banning people for posting the wrong opinions there. But it's interesting how the people who used to complain about political bias, now seem to not care, and the people who argued "Twitter is a private company they can do what they want" suddenly think the conservative leaning algorithm now on X is a problem. It's hard to get people across political lines to agree when we do this.

In my opinion there two issues here, neither are politically partisan.

The first is that we humans are flawed and algorithms can use our flaws against us. I've repeatedly spoken about how much I love YouTube's algorithm because despite some people saying it's an echo chamber, I think it's one of the few recommendation algorithms which will serves you a genuinely diverse range of content. But I suspect that's because I genuinely like consuming a very wide range of political content and I know I'm in a minority there (probably because I'm interested in politics as a meta subject, but don't have strong political opinions myself). But my point is these algorithms can work really well if you genuinely want to watch a diverse range of political content.

Secondly some recommendation algorithms (and search algorithms) seem to be genuinely biased which I'd argue isn't a problem itself (they are private companies and can do what they want), but that bias isn't transparent. X very clearly has a conservative bias and Bluesky also very clearly has political bias. Neither would admit their bias so people incorrectly assume they're being served something which is fairly representative of public opinion rather than curated – either by moderation or algorithm tweaks.

What we need is honesty, both from individuals who are themselves seeking out their own bias, and platforms which pretend to not have bias but do, and therefore influence where people believe the center ground is.

We can all be more honest with ourselves. If you exclusively use X or Bluesky, it's worth asking why that is, especially if you're engaging with political content on these platforms. But secondly I think we do need more regulation around the transparency of algorithms. I don't necessary think it's a problem if some platform recommends certain content above other content, or has some algorithm to ban users posts content they don't like, but these decisions should be far transparent than they are today so people are at least able to feed that into how they perceive the neutrality of the content they're consuming.

Re: The political effects of X's feed algorithm

#40
post #7

I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. So changing your fee…

I'm not sure what your point is. How is "being exposed to X's current user base instead of their old followers" not equivalent to "turning on the feed algorithm"? You doubt the effect is due to the algorithm, but your alternative explanation describes exactly what the algorithm does.
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