This is pretty unsurprising for anyone who has used twitter. The entire way it's set up is that you have clusters of mutual followers who form communities, and

This is pretty unsurprising for anyone who has used twitter. The entire way it's set up is that you have clusters of mutual followers who form communities, and they engage in fairly innocuous ways, and then because the site is public-by-default you get inter-group conversations where someone from one of these communities will see something posted by one of the other communities and at this point the two communities go to war. It's like if 1 in every 100 posts on Reddit appeared on a different sub-reddit. Think of the engagement when a /r/conservative post just pops up on /r/politics. Reddit has obviously seen what happens there and has made big moves to stop that happening, but at twitter that's the default way the site works. It's fantastic for engagement and no one at twitter wanted to kill the golden goose. Having said that, this study is quite unfortunate in its timing - it managed to time it's data collection at the exact point in time where Elon Musk was forcing his employees to manually boost his tweets so that he could get more views than Biden [1]. So basically while the twitter algo had been pretty stable for the last decade they managed to time their data collection over the exact week where the moron decided to start messing with it to stroke his own ego. [1]:https://proofpointisolation.com/browser?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2023%2F2%2F14%2F23600358%2Felon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter https://proofpointisolation.com/browser?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww...