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Comment by xyzal | Hacker News Reader

Not that hard really (found only German example though)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/global-witness_globalwitnessi...

That doesn't really prove that much. They only made 3 accounts on X, then with each account they followed the 4 major parties and their leaders. Not a very good sample size.

Additionally, the underlying algo could lean toward to what causes more engagement rather than equally tailoring each party. Without having any information personally about German politics or their cultural engagement with social media, I can only anecdotally say that in America, it appears to me that the ones most engaged with social media on X are more often than not right leaning. More of the left-leaning engagement seems increasingly moving towards other outlets, such as Bluesky.

this is the playbook. they dont need to prove it beyond some weak deduction mecanism. they did it for romania to cancel an election

Social media is a populist's dream come true.

All the anger is amplified through an algorithm and you can't even say it's the algorithm's fault.

> I can only anecdotally say that in America, it appears to me that the ones most engaged with social media on X are more often than not right leaning. More of the left-leaning engagement seems increasingly moving towards other outlets, such as Bluesky.

Isn't that movement because Musk changed X to increase promotion of right-wing things and decrease promotion of left-wing things?

Before Musk Twitter did promote right-wing stuff more than left-wing stuff. I don't have a cite but there was a paper published by researchers who had been given full access to internal Twitter data that showed this.

That level of right-leaning is probably the level of right-leaning you get from the natural level of engagement you get on a fairly neutral platform from right-wing people being more likely to engage than left-wing people.

After Elon bought Twitter, they ended up losing something like 10% of their users. That's going to be made up mostly of highly ideological ostensibly left-leaning Americans, likely with a much higher than average "engagement." And the lion's share of that happened long before there were any meaningful algorithmic changes. That alone is going to create a meaningful shift in the status quo on overtly political topics.

> That doesn't really prove that much.

You seem confused. France launched a criminal probe, whose goal is to investigate whether these types of biases reflect actual manipulation from Twitter. You are presented with evidence suggesting these biases exist. Now France is expected to look into them. Their findings will either support a criminal case, reject a criminal case, or simply not support further investigations.

> Pushing antisemitism, holocaust denial, and supremacist content is not ok, even if you argue they are only pushing extremist content for the clicks (which is a laughably bad hypothesis as Twitter's business model depends on the platform having mainstream appeal)

What if e.g. right-leaning content gets more likes/upvotes and this makes the algorithm show the posts more? That way, the algorithm can still be neutral, but the result is not.

"The left can't meme" is just one instance of so-called "meme magic" that came good, if good is what you see in the enterprise or if the particular ends justified the memes.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-left-cant-meme

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-magic

https://unherd.com/2021/08/why-the-left-cant-meme/ | https://web.archive.org/web/20210924231415/https://unherd.co...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/trumps-occult-online-support... | https://web.archive.org/web/20170125155034/http://motherboar...

As for me? I am beside myself. I view the content as part performance, part farce, all kayfabe. Trump et al learned from the best:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation#A_World_Wit...

> In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump employs the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street. Curtis asserts that Trump "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant.

> The American Left's attempt to resist Trump on the internet had no effect. In fact, they were just feeding the social media corporations who valued their many additional clicks.

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

> Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov (Russian: Владислав Юрьевич Сурков; born 21 September 1964) is a Russian politician. He was First Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration from 1999 to 2011, during which time he was often viewed as the main ideologist of the Kremlin who proposed and implemented the concept of sovereign democracy in Russia. From December 2011 until May 2013, Surkov served as the Russian Federation's Deputy Prime Minister. After his resignation, Surkov returned to the Presidential Executive Office and became a personal adviser of Vladimir Putin on relationships with Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ukraine.

> BBC documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis credits Surkov's blend of theater and politics with keeping Putin, and Putin's chosen successors, in power since 2000.

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

> Whilst talking about sovereign democracy in 2006, Mikhail Kasyanov said that "... the aims of this doctrine are quite clear: the concentration and holding of political power and property at any cost. The consequences of this are already evident, including the glorification of populism, the steady destruction of private and public institutions and the departure from the principles of the law, democracy, and the free market."

> United States Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried (in office 2005–2009) stated in a 2007 interview:

> > I get nervous when people put labels in front of democracy. Sovereign democracy, managed democracy, people's democracy, socialist democracy, Aryan democracy, Islamic democracy—I am not a big fan of adjectives. Managed democracy doesn't sound like democracy. Sovereign democracy strikes me as meaningless.

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

> Guided democracy, also called directed democracy and managed democracy, is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto authoritarian government or, in some cases, as an autocratic government. Such hybrid regimes are legitimized by elections, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals.

> In a guided democracy, the government controls elections such that the people can exercise democratic rights without truly changing public policy. While they follow basic democratic principles, there can be major deviations towards authoritarianism. Under managed democracy, the state's continuous use of propaganda techniques, such as through manufacturing consent, prevents the electorate from having a significant impact on policy.

> The concept is also related to semi-democracy, also known as anocracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ve_Got_No_Strings

> Down where the Volga flows

> There's a Russian rendez-vous

> Where me and Ivan go

> But I'd rather go with you, hey

> There are no strings on me

Be well, anon.

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