10 ms·
The author_is_elon flag doesn't surprise me, but the two political designators are somewhat shocking. I'd sure like to know what changes based on what Twitter
by jawns 4y ago
The author_is_elon flag doesn't surprise me, but the two political designators are somewhat shocking. I'd sure like to know what changes based on what Twitter knows about your political affiliation.
- 6nf 4y agoSo many questions. How are users tagged D or R? Is that a manual process or automated somehow? What is the effect of these tags? Can I find out if my Twitter account is in one of those buckets?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- moffkalast 4y agoEspecially for people that aren't... you know.. Americans. Unless they mean actual public figure party members which are known and probably verified.
- userbinator 4y agoThen it probably means which side you'd be on if you were American.
- smegger001 4y agoyou could probably algorithmically determine it in most cases based on any number of indicators from phrases used, to communities interacted with, which hashtages are included, which cohort retweets and likes most etc... thats not even getting into simply tagging political figures with the party they officially affiliate themselves with
- abracadaniel 4y agoAnd how are they choosing to balance them, per capita, or just both sides should get 50%? It seems pretty clear they are making editorial decisions here. Does that break their section 230 protections?
- astrange 4y ago"Section 230 protections" have nothing to do with "editorial decisions"
- KarlKemp 4y agoPlease read something. Preferably section 230, which is short. Alternatively something entirely different, as long as that keeps you occupied.
- krapp 4y ago>It seems pretty clear they are making editorial decisions here. Does that break their section 230 protections? No. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
- cma 4y agoLikely they are tracking performance verified politician accounts based on registered party affiliation. Why republican should count equal in the evaluation metric to democrat when nunerically there are less republican voters, let alone proportions on Twitter, is another question.
- stouset 4y agoI suspect that these are used for metrics tracking rather than being fed back into the recommendation engine. But there's no real way to know for sure given the limited release. These predicates aren't actually used anywhere in the code that's been made available.
- krapp 4y agoThe repo suggests it's about tracking engagement metrics[0], so Team Red people see more Team Red content and vice versa. Nothing nefarious. [0]https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b928b479b512ec51ac2c3821f5922/home-mixer/server/src/main/scala/com/twitter/home_mixer/functional_component/feature_hydrator/RequestQueryFeatureHydrator.scala#L86 https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
- jeron 4y agoYou say it’s not nefarious but isn’t that how echo chambers are created?
- krapp 4y agoI don't believe echo chambers are nefarious - there's no hidden agenda involved with them. That's just how recommendation algorithms work, and it's what most people want. But if someone finds some code that suppresses recommendations from a specific political ideology across the board, that would be nefarious, IMO.
- thfuran 4y agoEcho chambers may not be nefarious, but they are insidious.
- krapp 4y agoThey can be if they're involuntary and inescapable, but neither is the case for Twitter. It's designed around letting you curate your own feed, but it also constantly throws random stuff in through retweets and quote tweets - which is what people hate the most about the platform.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago[flagged]
- 4y ago
- jen20 4y agoIt's not that shocking... Half the people that got promoted on my timeline were perpetually candidates for elections I couldn't vote in, and they _self-identified_ as Republican or Democrat in their own bios, or via the registration of their candidacy... This is why I exclusively used to use Twitter in the "people I follow only" mode, and simply shut my account down when they pushed harder on the algorithm.
- jandrese 4y agoI thought it was interesting how it explicitly doesn't boost independents. So much of the two-party system is self-reinforcing.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoOr anti-statists! Not everyone who engages with politics is a bootlicker for authoritarianism but it sure feels like there’s no space made for this perspective (obviously)
- emodendroket 4y agoThe vast majority of self-proclaimed independents vote with one party just as reliably as registered members.
- philistine 4y agoAmerican's lax attitude towards cultivating more than two parties is literally killing the republic from the inside.
- airstrike 4y agoYou'd think a country that played a central role in a global, decades-long unstable regime of bipolar power that routinely pushed mankind to the brink of nuclear oblivion would know better than to have a bipolar electoral system
- robertlagrant 4y ago> routinely pushed mankind to the brink of nuclear oblivion I'm struggling to think of a reason why this is anything but bad faith nonsense.
- weaksauce 4y agohave you never heard of the many times we almost came to setting off full scale nuclear warfare because of the bipolar power war of the ussr v usa et.al.? the only thing that saved us was cooler heads that prevailed on both sides.
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoExactly. I don't see NPA (no party affiliation) anywhere.
- ldoughty 4y agoDid you not get the memo? "If you're not with us, you're against us". It's probably more of a conservative/liberal identifier based on US political party ideals... And they likely would filter any metrics from this by the users country
- partiallypro 4y agoFacebook guesses your political affiliation as well, you can even look über your settings to see what they guessed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]