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Comment by ahs1 | Hacker News Reader

what about the other apps?

Twitter before Musk had a bias toward promoting conservatives [1].

[1] https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter...

Well X has a pretty clear slant as of late. I've tried making a fresh burner account a few times to see what the default algorithm is like and surprise, it's dominated by Elon Musk himself, his fanboys/orbiters, and political content which strongly aligns with his views.

Even when dissenting political content slips into the feed it's usually still about Elon Musk, the algorithm surfaces more mentions of him than the actual president.

Same. Made a burner account, follow nothing and nobody, tweet nothing, like nothing, days later I check in on it and I have like a dozen notifications of tweets from the likes of Alex Jones and Donald Trump Jr.

Benn Jordan did a good video that covered the bots and bias on X recently. Don't know if it or the papers were submitted here before (anyone feel free to submit it not):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y

What was formerly Twitter is now some guy's private web site, just a guy with a whole lot of money.

It was before too, but it was a different guy

It was publicly owned....not one individual.

Well ultimately all centralized sites are someone's -- some person, or some company.

The previous incarnation had its own biases and such, but it did try to run a little more like a real company with official policies. The current incarnation is whatever Elon's mood this second happens to be.

Don't be naive. The previous management also used their power to promote their preferred narratives in arbitrary and capricious ways with no regard for fundamental principles and no accountability. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The only reason I even knew who Jack Dorsey was was from podcasts talking about him. Elon's tweets show up in my feed regularly, and sometimes are even pushed to my phone, despite not engaging with them and even explicitly pressing the "show less" button. (I also get push notification from conservative accounts, despite being what most of them would call "far left")

Why would you ever allow push notifications from any social media? And on X you can still mute or block individual accounts that you don't want to see.

That isn’t the point of this entire thread, though. It’s about what the default is, because like it or not, most people are crazy susceptible and have practically zero media literacy.

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