X Algorithm Feeds Users Political Content Whether They Want It or Not
wsj.com
wsj.com
However, several other factors also help me:
- I'm very aggressive with telling Twitter and any other platform when I don't like something by using the "Not Interested" button or equivalent. This seems to work well with Twitter.
- Twitter loads slowly on my system, so I use a Firefox add on that hides the whole sidebar or whatever they call the trending topics. So I don't see them anymore, even though they weren't really bothering me in the first place.
- I honestly barely use Twitter except to see the latest on specific accounts. I'll usually click on links directly to access them and not depend on a feed. Stuff that is super popular on Twitter tends to be screenshotted and posted to other platforms anyway.
- Overall my even minimal use of Twitter is dwindling; most of the accounts that have content I like on Twitter are also on BlueSky.
I suspect that generally coincided with the ability to use it briefly and then walk away for a day or more. Which ... isn't good for ad impressions, and I suspect the main driver for engagement hooking.
A lot of people don't have the ability to reject this, it seems, and it obviously has a real mental health toll. The second I find myself feeling "bad" when using an app I just close it down for weeks at a time. No place has that been more true or for longer than the current iteration of Twitter. Fundamentally ad-driven social media works best financially when they have you there mashing buttons and clicking posts.
True, it boggles the mind the extents to which some people twist and turn to salvage the usability of a system that's compromised and managed so that it actively works against your best interests.
It's like enumerating a list of pro tips on what sprinkles to pour over shit sandwiches to make them less revolting. No, sprinkles are not a solution. The solution is to not eat shit sandwiches.
That drives me absolutely crazy because that was one way that political crap that I didn't want got shown to me.
Also, this is shocking I know, but I don't agree with or like everything that people I know and/or follow think or like. So a lot of these posts were from pages that I am already familiar with, have already decided I don't like and want to not follow, and yet it STILL gets shoved in my face because people & pages I follow are into something that they are objectively wrong to be into and should thus rethink every life decision they ever made over the years that helped to drive them towards being interested in such garbage.
I know I'm old but all I want in any "news feed" is to show me latest posts from people/pages I follow directly in chronological order with pagination and no automatic refreshing of the news feed etc.
But I guess I'm not the type of user they are chasing .. and I find myself organically being less and less interested in engaging as a result. I don't need to break social media addiction ... the social media "platforms" do that for me with their "features."
Once it is gone Twitter becomes usable again – you only see who you follow and ads. Otherwise it is a really awful experience.
It sou ds to me that you want Mastodon
But you need a plugin (or run some javascript). I am trying to get a Safari Extension through the App Store... but that is taking some time.
(function() {
var defaultMatch = "For you";
function fixYou() {
let firstSelected = document.querySelectorAll('[href="/home"][aria-selected="true"]')[0];
let text = firstSelected.textContent;
if(text == defaultMatch){
document.querySelectorAll('[href="/home"][aria-selected="false"]')[0].click();
}
}
const observer = new MutationObserver((mutations) => { fixYou() });
observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
window.addEventListener('load', () => { fixYou(); });
})();
If you are trying to sell engagement with, say, some product on Amazon, presumably the seller will eventually wonder why nobody is clicking your tracker links and buying their products. But the targets of political ads get to go vote in private, nobody knows how effective the propaganda was!
At least then users can pick their own poison, rather than be force-fed one.
Twitter used to soften the edge on this a bit; you engaged with a few [some thing] posts and you'd get 1 or 2 more over the next day. Now you can very quickly get into an infinite loop. The "algorithm" (and yes, I hate writing this) digs its claws in right after an engagement.
FB also shows me a lo of pseudo-science, similar history, etc. because of my interests in the real things. It has recently taken to showing me pictures of Eastern Europe for no apparent reason.
Overall, I really do not like Facebook (I’m only on there because some relatives are). I just think their algorithm is somewhat effective. I think I’ve managed to get them to label me as somebody with strong political opinions but low emotional valence toward politics, by marking some political posts or pseudo-political posts as offensive to me, but never allowing political content to “dwell” in premium screen space in the app.
Edit: I say I think their algorithm is effective, although I should say, I’m pretty sure I did trick it. In fact I’m very concerned about politics but I make sure to only angstily read articles I disagree with in Firefox browser with lots of tracking protection on.
Similar to me. Friends and relatives. Its also how the home education community in the UK communicates (I admin two groups, and that is my main reason for being on it regularly), an unfortunate reflection of the hold FB has on the demographic (middle aged because they are parents, mostly women because even in the 21st century men do not bring up kids).
Why do you think this is relevant, if the subject is Twitter's algorithm?
Your comment reads like whataboutism.
It's been obviously going downhill for a while and the reason has been obvious too. The leadership doesn't care about your concerns.
Why not stop using it or move to something else?
There are a bunch of alternatives out there and most people don't have a job that requires them to specifically use Twitter.
Unlike Facebook, where I know I have missed out on communities by not using it, I don't feel like I've ever lost anything by not using Twitter. Anything that goes viral on Twitter these days gets a bunch of mainstream news articles anyway.
I agree. Just stop using it already. What's the value of subscribing to a Kremlin bot sandbox? Sometimes these complaints just sound like attempts to keep people engaged after clearly identifying the elephant in the room.
The residual reason to use twitter isn't stuff that goes viral on Twitter, it is an existing network of specific individuals on Twitter (which ones are different for each user for whom it is an issue) who haven't moved off.
1. Create a list of accounts you want to follow at https://x.com/<your_username>/lists
2. Bookmark your list instead of the main feed
3. Optional: Use a browser extension to auto-redirect to your list
Result: A chronological feed without algorithmic interference.
On Mastodon I post articles about politics in France, Brazil, Nepal and such and also about political science but I have rules that block words like "fascist" as well as the names of major US politicians -- I don't care what tribe people are in and the more you make me know the more I go down the Unfollow -> Mute -> Block path.
Bluesky's algorithmic feed has a bias towards nice and the people may be nicer too (e.g. Bluesky has "chronic illness" cases to but unlike on Mastodon they don't blame me) and I see a lot less anger than I see on Mastodon without having to set up a lot of filters. Still I am doing the "follow a lot of people to get some to follow you back" thing and finding it is emotionally draining to scan through a few hundred profiles and reject all the ones that talk about politics. It's a job for my agent YOShInOn.
Maybe that would be expensive and harmful to engagement, but one can dream.
Reddit has transitioned into 100% propaganda mode. Every single post and comment is political astroturfing.
The topic of Russian bots pushing all sort of propaganda designed to destabilize western countries is a well known problem. There are already multiple discussions on stunts like blatant sock puppet accounts and poorly-built LLM-powered bots dumping massive volumes of propaganda.
This problem is well established. Until now the answer to this problem was relying on social networks to moderate abusive content and actively fight state actors from totalitarian regimes engaged in what is ultimately warfare against democratic nations. What makes Twitter stand out is how one of these totalitarian regimes ended up compromising a major social network and is using it's leverage to attack other nations with free reign. This is what makes Twitter stand out.
I doubt there are humans behind as much as 40% of some subs.
My Twitter is purely construction technology (thrilling I know) and I never see anything else.
Also they stopped resetting me back to For You, so I only see content from accounts I actively follow or they retweet.
In lieu of an FDA for algorithms that I would love to see, it would be great to have some basic assessments of the distributions of recommendations an algorithm is making.
IIRC, he was never far away from anything related to history, politics or philosophy; but hard to reach from anything else like sport or music.
Write-up here: https://eticlab.co.uk/jordan-petersons-proliferation/
On the other hand, we think that we can't effectively classify the majority of posts.
can be easily done by one person, and with a fairly good level of accuracy and key-word tagging. emphasis on "fairly good", but diminishing returns and all that.
For starters, cross-referencing it with popular propaganda talking points. Smear campaigns are a dead giveaway, and adding two or three topics should be enough to cover the majority of propaganda posts.
I'd argue that just having an effective anti-bot policy is enough to render this a non-issue, but apparently Elon Musk prefers Twitter to be a Kremlin bot sandbox.
In the UK, broadcast news is heavily regulated by an independent body (Ofcom), and newspapers are "self-regulated" by a body created after the phone-hacking scandal[1] staffed by newspaper insiders (IPSO). Even so, sometimes bad things happen and Ofcom has to take GB News to task, and IPSO has to tell one of its mates off for printing something invasive. This is all below the level of the law coming into play (for example, slander/libel or personal data handling), this is just "best practice".
The regulators are needed in the UK and everywhere else in the World they exist not to censor platform owners and contributors, but to protect the wider World from them. You can't just break into somebody's voicemail and report what you heard any more. You can't just have one politician interview another and pretend its news content, no matter what GB News say. There are standards to try and improve the quality of the output to make it useful.
Social media has clearly reached a point where some rules are necessary for that purpose. Meta have had a little swing at this with their own Oversight Board, but its clearly not working enough in the interests of the audience because we keep finding examples of dead teenagers whose parents insist could have been saved if Meta had just been better members of society. [2]
And then there is Musk. I get it, he started a company that builds cool rockets, and bought Tesla and drove it bigger, and he had a cameo in Iron Man 2 because Tony Stark is meant to be modeled on him by the film creators, but it's clear now, he can't run an influential platform well, and it's no surprise that even if he isn't actively promoting his strong political preferences in the algorithm, he's not exactly diving in and insisting it gets fixed to solve this problem.
Regulation is seen by the tech industry as an impediment to innovation, a barrier to growth. I think with technologies that impact the health of a society, that society has a right - a need - to see that those technologies are regulated in the name of the society not being harmed by it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/molly-russell-inquest-teenager-di...
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/19/tech/social-media-lawsuit...
You say that, but then again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_Ireland_Back_to_the_Irish...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece:_The_Hidden_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_bombing_memo#Offici...
The second one is irrelevant in the modern context: the IBA hasn't been a regulator for over 30 years, and had a different set of guidelines and authority to Ofcom. It is unlikely that a fair and balanced account where a reasonable right to reply was offered to all parties would be banned from broadcast today.
The third one is a ban under OSA, and has nothing to do with media regulators, its about the scope of acts like the OSA, and its appropriate use.
I don't know, I don't trust any of these exposes on X anymore after the WSJ published an "Elon Musk has used illegal drugs" article that cited "people familiar with Musk” and unnamed board members said they expressed concerns privately to his brother. I mean, come on. Can you imagine this article written and featured prominently on anyone else?
They lost all credibility in terms of reporting on anything Musk related.
What I’m saying is not offering algorithmic choice is, in itself, a choice that X makes.
Ability to block certain topics completely would be nice -- though it goes for all media. With ever smaller / faster (local) LLMs, I could imagine a nifty browser extension that does that.
Besides what the others have noted, are you implying that the Twitter is leftist, or that the WSJ is?
Overall, both the WSJ and Twitter very much lean right in the political spectrum.
e.g.
##p:has-text(/tiktok|tik-tok|twitter/i)
Apples and oranges.
Reading the WSJ is a kin to subscribing to a specific Twitter user: you know what content to expect, and you are interested to read more.
Being force-fed political content you explicitly have not subscribed to is like you're reading the WSJ and out of nowhere you get pages from, say, MAGA's newsletter.
Not the same, is it?