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Comment by tech234a | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the "author_is_elon", "author_is_power_user", "author_is_democrat", and "author_is_republican" labels are for [1].

[1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/home-mixe...

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Elon is addressing this in the Twitter Space right now. "It definitely shouldn't be dividing people into Republican and Democrats; that makes no sense[...] you've identified something we should be getting rid of right away."

We should also not divide people into Elon and non-Elon.

Does it make sense to divide people into Elon and not Elon?

You mean owner and not owner? I think it's fair.

For what purpose? Do we know what this is used for?

Apparently it’s for analytics

In my hobby project where I have a secret admin page? Sure. In a (formerly) multi-million dollar prod application? Not really fair.

To Elon, yes.

It's not that uncommon to filter analytics based on how much money a user has spent on the platform.

It certainly does to Elon.

Crazies vs the rest

It's for content analytics, and I assume it's to make sure that changes to the platform can't be argued to bias one party over another.

Or one individual over the rest of the world?

You mean like this algorithmic bias?

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...

Or even maybe to provide some background to various bits of lingo / acronyms people use.

I’m thinking along the lines of common word’s that have vastly different meanings depending on who’s saying it.

So false equivalence is written into the platform. Insane opinions of one party must be displayed as often as moderate opinions of the other. It definitely works for angering everyone on Twitter, not so much for actual dialog or progress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

Well, sounds like this pull request doesn't get merged. https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/pull/234

but how can we be sure it isn't doing that?! first, we would need to figure out a way to identify who-

As if Elon has a clue what that feature is or is not being used for.

He didn’t say he knew what it did? It’s a good enough response to say that it shouldn’t be doing that period.

Generally, one should understand chesterton's fence before tearing it down

He was answering a question on the spot live on a video call. Careful consideration can come later by the devs who will investigate.

Must be nice to have people hold you to such high standards though. A sign of respect in a way. No matter how strenuous the takes.

Making commitments to things without understanding the basics isn’t something to be respected, it’s just dumb

The amount of stretches people make in these threads is amusing. There's enough real things to care about, don't need to set completely unrealistic standards you'd never impose on yourself or 99% of others you didn't already despise.

I'd love to see the exact date author_is_elon was added. Too bad they didn't publish the commit history

I think around mid February https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

IIRC it was very recent, there was a Twitter engineer that was fired after explaining to Elon that the algorithm was not biased against him: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/10/petulant-elon-musk-fired-tw... Almost certainly after that event Elon had them explicitly bump his tweets in their reach.

This speculation seems mostly informed by a negative opinion of Elon. Is there any real indication he gave this instruction?

Yes that weekend everyone started seeing Elon's tweets in their timelines: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

You seem weirdly protective of Elon fyi

I’m pretty neutral on musk. His fanboys are crazy but by and large they aren’t here so there isn’t much opportunity to challenge them.

So much has been concluded about him here without any evidence, instead grounding it in the premise that he’s rotten.

Premise? The guy spews the most vile stuff and russian propaganda. There is more than premise to say he’s a piece of shit.

And Elon later explained that that had nothing to do from him making any specific request that his tweets be valued.

This is largely a false creation without evidence to back it up. People are assuming intention behind something that's much more easily explained as a bug, one that was quickly fixed. If it wasn't a bug, why would it disappear if people assume Elon is narcissistic as people claim? It'd still be prioritizing his tweets if it wasn't a bug.

It's an incredible coincidence that, out of hundreds of millions of accounts, this bug happened to elevate the account of the person who owns twitter. I'm not saying it was 100% intentional, but it does suggest Musk's account is 'special' in some way.

Did anyone look to see if anyone else was also elevated? Surely there's an extreme measurement bias if the highest followed account gets boosted. There's no evidence to support the idea that only Elon Musk was elevated.

I goddamn hope there is not much positive opinion of that scammer anywhere, but unfortunately there is still too many..

  Musk expressed his disappointment with engineers' work and *told them to track* how many times his tweets get recommended, one worker told the outlet.

so we know exactly when and why "author_is_elon" was added to the code

That's one possible explanation. If you were implementing that change, would you do it by embedding an "elon" variable in the codebase, or would you make the specific account a parameter?

Here is a screenshot in case this changes later:

https://i.imgur.com/F8GSeyH.png

And, no, this wasn't in a merge-request, it was in the "main" branch of HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala.

What's all the "DDG"? Is this data from DuckDuckGo?

I doubt it, since the isElon thing also has the abbreviation

Probably something like "Data Distribution Group".

Maybe the name for an internal service/environment. It's also referenced in this viral tweet from November:

https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/15919691002257367...

DuckDuckGoose is the twitter A/B test framework

I see Twitter engineers are not from Minnesota.

That's actually kind of a cool and fitting name.

  \*
  \* These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are
  \* serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users.
  \* This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes
  \* that negatively impacts one group over others.
  \*

From: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...

That makes sense; I guess that means Elon is considered a "group" now.

I know there's a joke about this regarding his ego and there's certainly some truth in that, however it's also quite believable that after a deployment he might have noticed the popularity of his tweets going down (since he no doubt checks his reach), so I can kind of understand how he might see "republicans", "democrats" and "celebrities_it_makes_sense_to_check_this_with_my_account_as_i_am_a_very_active_user" as core categories that need to have their reach balanced.

We don't need to speculate on this. It sounds like he did actually fire engineers over his tweets getting less engagement than he wanted.

https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-...

Honestly, if you read behind the lines, it sounds like the employee was intentionally making a joke about it at his expense in front of a bunch of people, and I think a lot of CEOs would take that badly as this is effectively the same thing as calling your boss egocentric.

But, we do have a bit of code that measures metrics on his account, so can we find the bit of code that increases the engagement on his account?

> But, we do have a bit of code that measures metrics on his account, so can we find the bit of code that increases the engagement on his account?

There doesn't need to be. When they run AB tests, it's possible that they'd pick the winning cell if it makes the Elon metrics look better.

Even if the algorithm doesn't do anything explicit about boosting him, it can be tweaked through AB testing to favor him.

You mean A/B testing of weights/biases?

No, the "weights" of your model are trained from the input data. What is usually AB tested are hyperparameters of the model, or different "flavors" of (model+input data).

What people are implying is still unsubstantiated though. The engineers on the Twitter Space say that this is to ensure that changes they make do not bias one category over another, they don't say that it's in order that they can make discretionary updates to bias towards Elon Musk.

Maybe after every update to the model, they check these stats to ensure that they haven't biased towards Elon Musk, and if so roll the change back.

? Considering Elon as its own category is a bias.

> “When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

Reading between the lines, Musk sounds like a giant baby.

> it's also quite believable that after a deployment he might have noticed the popularity of his tweets going down

He did notice it and it was treated as a 5 alarm fire, with a Musk cousin sending 2 am slack messages (on a Monday!) to Twitter engineers to urgently fix Elon's reach[1].

1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

The proper way to do that is create a pool of celebrities and monitor them. Not just the CEO's account.

For very active accounts, I assume that's what the "vits" or "power user" one is for. Or, heck, "vits" might actually be what you said.

ChatGPT suggests: Vitriolic accounts.

So now engineers working on the algo can ensure their launches won't lower Elon's tweet visibility. Looks like those remaining at Twitter have a knack for corporate survival.

Yeah, surely the fan-boys who remain at Twitter are interested in lowering the visibility of Elon, not the opposite.

I read that as being able to make sure they don't lower his engagement with a release

Makes you wonder how they would deal with a reduction in Twitter users.

I think they meant that Twitter developers can make sure their most recent changes won't get them fired by lowering his visibility.

> Looks like those remaining at Twitter have a knack for corporate survival.

If Green Cards quotas suddenly became available how many would stay?

When your visa is on the line, you’ll do anything

Engineers who work at twitter can easily find another job in the US.

even considering all the layoffs other companies are doing?

What do you think is the percentage of companies who did layoffs or have hiring freezes vs companies who are hiring high caliber engineers?

Can they? I don't know, but I imagine that at this point, everyone still working for Twitter is there because they don't have any other realistic option.

That's assuming too much in my opinion. Not everyone has the same or similar opinions regarding their work or Elon, even if it's hard for you to believe.

I was basing my speculation purely on the working conditions there, not on any supposition about people's attitudes about their work or Musk.

> even if it's hard for you to believe.

It's not hard for me to believe at all.

Only because you are blinded by your own biases. There are people there that think it will be the next spacex or Tesla

Most people working there are looking for other jobs. It is not hard to find another job, but in this market it is hard to find one that pays the same. A lot of people have 4 year stock grants and annual refreshers, pushing their compensation very high which can only be matched at other tech companies, which currently are not hiring much.

It's harder with visas, because you're not gambling if you can find another job, you're gambling if your employer can acquire a visa in time for you to not be deported.

Posted on another reply, but according to this one link [0] you can start the visa process at a new company while still employed at your current job.

0: https://usvisagroup.com/changing-jobs-h-1b-visa/

Right, so it's still justified to feel bad for visa workers in this case, because they are stuck at an abusive workplace because of circumstances of their visa.

H1-Bs are harder to get approved these days and a lot of companies don't want to go through the effort/cost to do so

According to this one link [0], H1B "tranfers" are not subject to visa caps. Plus you can search for new jobs and start the process while still employed.

0: https://usvisagroup.com/changing-jobs-h-1b-visa

With forced RTO and "hardcore" mandates, it's difficult to find 6+ hours of time to interview at other companies (assuming there are any open visa sponsorships available).

Companies can't revoke visas of employees... That's just not how H1B Visas work. Yes they can be fired, but they can go find another job and keep the Visa.

He is the full owner of Twitter. It's his company, so nobody is going to fire him as CEO for over-promoting his tweets.

The users can and often do fire the CEO.

Still smells to high heaven to me. Not the Elon part, I don't really care about that. But collecting metrics about "republican" vs "democrat" sounds like a particularly bad set of priorities at work.

> sounds pretty suspicious.

Sounds toxic to me

This exactly.. But without the models or policies we can only infer, which give plausible deniability.

Can't say I'm shocked overall, but it's strange to see it so 'on the nose'

but the people who care about stats are usually american politicians. they can present them with this data. (and use Elon as a control LOL)

About 40% of US voters are not registered with any political party, so at least they will avoid whatever this triggers.

So you imagine these tags are set by looking account names up on state voter registration lists?

Well, if not, then the tags have such a large error bar as to be meaningless.

Or the data is assumed good and used dangerously.

And then there is the rest of the world.

Anyone that has worked in social network recommendations (raises hand) knows that they'll be accused of being politically biased, particularly if the recommendations aren't explicitly promoting biased news sites on the Right. (e.g. The Associated Press[0] is leftist propaganda! Where's unbiased news like Gateway Pundit[1] or InfoWars[5]?!) So data scientists and engineers will get pulled in to investigate the latest ref working[2][4], and this will let them easily determine that no, there is no bias.

None of this will matter though, because the complaints are made in bad faith.[2][3]

You may say this is biased comment, but I’m not going to engage in false equivalences, when the outrage and results of the outrage aren’t symmetrical. Cite one story where a major social network (Twitter, Facebook, Google News, YouTube, etc) publicly came out and said that they were adjusting their algorithms to make it more lefty. I’ll wait. This bad faith of the complaints are particularly obvious when the most popular and influential right wing television channel, Fox News, has been caught red handed knowingly spreading conspiracy theories for ratings.[6]

[0] "Associated Press is the least biased according to both Democrats and Republicans." https://www.businessinsider.com/most-biased-news-outlets-in-...

[1] "The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gateway_Pundit

[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-22-mn-26779-...

[3] "Internal report finds ‘virtually identical’ rates of conservative and liberal topics, but guidelines updated to ‘exclude possibility of improper actions’" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/24/facebook-...

[4] "There is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one." -- Rich Bond, 1992 Republican Party Chairman https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-working...

[5] “InfoWars is an American far-right conspiracy theory and fake news website owned by Alex Jones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars

[6] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/all-the-texts-fox-ne...

Well, there was this:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...

That doesn't say they did anything about it. Just that right wing complaints had no substance.

In fact, in just over a year from the publication of that blog post, Twitter -- as a matter of official company policy -- would be promoting the unfounded belief that Twitter engineers and scientists were actively engaging in a propaganda campaign against conservatives.

The exact opposite reaction of what I'm looking for.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using...

I think it says a lot about the complaints. Some people just can't stop crying wolf to get attention

And apparently it works, considering those flags

It’s not just to complain. It’s an actual political strategy.

I suspect it plays into this stuff: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

They wanted to answer the questions of "is twitter biased against Republicans" so they measured it, turns out they favored republicans.

I would not be surprised if “author_is_elon” was added after he bought the company and worked the engineers too hard to figure out why his tweets don’t have a lot of engagement.

https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-specia...

All in service of 'anti-bias' of course... /s

Haha, that's pretty funny, of course that's a thing

Wait ... that was not a joke? And they actually removed it from the repo about 4 hours later? That doesn't look good.

pretty sure Elon gets a boost in the algorithm. All okay - he's the owner of a private entity and can do as he pleases.

That’s what he blew all that cash on. It’s the whole point.

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