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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I can't believe any real person still uses Twitter. I haven't subscribed to anyone and have no subscribers. Nevertheless, whenever I open it, I'm swamped with US Neo-Nazi tweets, as well as pro-Russia and pro-Hamas content. I'm not saying it's the only content I see, but enough to make Twitter look like the front page of a terrorist organization. Apparently, the Twitter algorithm has learned that I'm using it to look up political tweets from time to time by following links, and adjusted its content accordingly to convince me of a hundred times more radical positions than I would ever endorse or want to see.

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You’re not wrong. The FYP, at least for my unused account, is garbage tier. Hell, the latest phenomenon it has picked up on is meme pages used to advertise OnlyFans and gambling, and outright pornography and porn ads. Some of the worst human beings are on there spreading ideas about race theory. Responses to anything vaguely popular are filled with blue check marks either trying to make money with engagement bait, or clout chasing by reply spam.

But Twitter allows you to curate your graph with the Following tab way better. There are enough sub-communities and funny people for it to still work.

And all recommendation algorithms are vulnerable. Thread’s head honcho had to release a statement because the recommendation algorithm on Threads became awful over the holiday period. And they aggressively want you on the FYP!

I dunno about anyone else but TikTok is head and shoulders ahead of Silicon Valley when it comes mixing follows with proximate interests on the FYP; It Just Works!™

I don't what is it with porn on twitter, the blue check was supposed to stop them but they have gotten way worse than before.

I was never a good user for twitter, I don't engage that much except for just reading news and just follow some techie people and communities. But even for my light usage I can clearly see the downgrade of the service

> blue check was supposed to stop them

I think this was always an illusion. The blue checkmark certainly hasn't presented a barrier to spammers, and if anything, the reply/promotion boost it gives you has accelerated the rate of spam now that you can more easily get attention.

> I haven't subscribed to anyone and have no subscribers.

That's your problem, right here. The social graph is the strongest signal there is.

Try following the people that are more interesting to you and your recommendations will vastly improve. Or don't, and just come to the Fediverse and use a nitter frontend for the occasional twitter link.

> I'm swamped with US Neo-Nazi tweets, as well as pro-Russia and pro-Hamas content.

> adjusted its content accordingly to convince me of a hundred times more radical positions

Globally, these positions are not radical (sans Neo-Nazi). The average human is (strongly) opposed to American foreign policy, if not outright pro-Russian/pro-Palestinian.

That said, these topics are also great engagement bait and X does push them for that reason.

They are common but not majority opinion. The average Indian is more supportive of Israel for example. That's the most populous country in the world and you definitely see them on X as well. The average Chinese doesn't care about either and doesn't use any foreign social media apps.

Many of us have a very selective view of the world. When you have a platform that allows most speech from anyone on the planet, such an open platform may seem extremely biased to people used to their bubbles, where their own opinion is the "normal" one and few people disagree with them.

The Chinese are overwhelmingly opposed to US foreign policy. Outright pro-Israel and pro-NATO views are virtually non-existent on Chinese social media.

Some Hindu-supremacist Indians support Israel because of shared Islamophobia, more or less. There is not much rabid Islamophobia outside of the West + India.

>They are common but not majority opinion.

To suggest that the (powerless) majority of 8 billion humans are not opposed to US foreign policy is... wildly out of touch. I would even wager that the average American is generally opposed to current US foreign policy.

I can't speak for US foreign policy, that might be true. I was commenting on your take regarding Israel and Russia, as someone who grew up in Asia - where the majority of the world population lives. A lot of people generally make the mistake of conflating government leadership opinion with the opinion of citizens. Those do not necessarily have anything in common, especially in dictatorships with unelected leaders. The average Chinese does not hate Jews nor do they care much about Russia. The majority have no opinion on this, they could not even find Israel on a map or tell you what the capital of Saudi Arabia is. The state media's reporting reflects the Communist Party's position, not necessarily the position of the people. Although Xi is working hard on drilling the people to make those one and the same.

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