The Twitter algorithm seems to be finely tuned to promote comments which fit the desired ideological narrative while demoting anything which goes against it. Th

The Twitter algorithm seems to be finely tuned to promote comments which fit the desired ideological narrative while demoting anything which goes against it. This often leads to strange situations where some mundane "conservative" post is followed by a page full of critical "progressive" posts, each of which has only a few "likes". After wading though a page or 2 of such finally posts which are more in agreement with the original comment show up. Those comments tend to have far higher "like" counts which seems to indicate people, well, like those comments better than they do the "progressive" ones. In itself there is something to be said for confronting people with different opinions and as such the algorithm could serve a function if it showed this behaviour across the political spectrum. This, however, is not the case - "progressive" posts are followed first by pages and pages of "progressive" comments in support of the post. Only after wading through those posts do the first critical comments appear. This behaviour is not entirely consistent but it does occur more often than not, especially in situations where there is a sufficient number of "progressive" comments to fill the first page or 2. In short, Twitter is heavily biased towards "progressive" comments/commenters - I assume the algorithm looks both at the content of the comment as well as at the commenters comment history to decide whether to promote or demote specific comments. As such is is not a usable platform for open discussion, not even for those who support those "progressive" causes - unless they consider an echo chamber a suitable location for such discussions. This leaves aside the fact that the message format used on Twitter makes it nigh impossible to express nuance, the whole thing is made for online shouting matches.