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I agree that seems presumptive. But of course twitter conveniently didn’t share the source code for how that factor is calculated. Turns out it’s hard to evaluate a big complex distributed system by looking at just one slice and no data.

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interesting though, that comment directly says that if I tweet in english and my interface is in german then I'll have a serious problem. Which I wouldn't think is so rare. How many people have english as their second language and use it online? It feels like this deboost would hit a lot of people. Or actually, I have my interface in english and I often tweet in german. So that would hit me from both sides.

"One of the user's understandable language" presumably refers to the list of languages in the browser's Accept-Language header. If you are tweeting in English, you'd likely have English in that header.

It may or may not use the Accept-Language header as well, but this is a user setting accessible via the Twitter web UI-- you specify your primary interface language and can specify any number of additional languages that you understand.

There's also a place in Twitter's settings to show languages that Twitter has inferred that you know (e.g. following a German-language account and interacting with it almost certainly means that you know some German).

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