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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

The repo suggests it's about tracking engagement metrics[0], so Team Red people see more Team Red content and vice versa. Nothing nefarious.

[0]https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...

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Why specifically track political parties? Where is author_is_american? Or author_is_mayonnaise_enjoyer?

Maybe it was a choice made many years ago that they thought was appropriate, but we can't yet know it's not used for other purposes. We can at least be reasonably sure they've added the author_is_elon within the past year. I would have thought there would be many more descriptors, or non-controversial descriptors.

Or maybe Elon specifically added those before releasing this code to get people riled up.

The point is probably to check that changes they make aren’t accidentally politically biased.

Twitter became a very politically charged platform after 2016, mainly among Americans. They'd be idiots not to take advantage of that.

You say it’s not nefarious but isn’t that how echo chambers are created?

I don't believe echo chambers are nefarious - there's no hidden agenda involved with them. That's just how recommendation algorithms work, and it's what most people want.

But if someone finds some code that suppresses recommendations from a specific political ideology across the board, that would be nefarious, IMO.

Echo chambers may not be nefarious, but they are insidious.

They can be if they're involuntary and inescapable, but neither is the case for Twitter. It's designed around letting you curate your own feed, but it also constantly throws random stuff in through retweets and quote tweets - which is what people hate the most about the platform.

The echo chamber in your first point does the suppression in the second.

Having a separate flag to track engagement specifically for Elon tweets isn't nefarious, but weird.

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