10 ms·

Manufactured consensus on x.com

317 points by cogitovirus 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
MaxPock 1y ago
X is once again full of bots selling crypto and financial services .
- josefritzishere 1y ago
  It's really degenerated into a trash heap. I quit years ago.
  - mmastrac 1y ago
    I pop in from time to time but I only ever see right-wing rage bait (??) and my old timeline is completely gone. I don't engage with any of it either, just scrolling until I finally catch a name I recognize and maybe dropping a like.
    - FredPret 1y ago
      There's also left-wing rage bait if you scroll down. It's sad that these social media companies supplanted proper journalism, only to then rot into this. What do we have now?
    - Shekelphile 1y ago
      And even on tweets that don't seem to be outwardly ragebait the top replies will always be from blue checked right wing accounts, of course.
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  Hey, that's not fair! It's also full of porn bots and Holocaust denial.
  - jjeaff 1y ago
    Don't forget the graphic fight videos with comments full of racial undertones. I have literally never engaged with nor watched more than a few seconds of those types of videos yet my feed is full of them.
    - vvpan 1y ago
      Ah yes the "look at what brown people are doing to our cities" accounts... One of the main reasons I am not on there anymore.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
      It's to radicalize people into becoming racists.
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    Every platform has Holocaust denial because that's the one thing that the far-left and far-right both agree on...
    - RankingMember 1y ago
      The far-left denies the Holocaust? On what grounds?
      - dismalaf 1y ago
        It's usually some mental gymnastics related to Israel, Gaza, etc... Because many Muslims deny the holocaust, much of the far-left has co-opted that rhetoric. It's super visible on TikTok, for example. Edit - some comments below this seem to doubt. Just go on TikTok to politically charged posts about Palestine. This whole thread is about social media. Not holocaust denial on the mainstream left, specifically the far-left on social media
        seadan83 1y ago
        Sounds like sampling bias TBH. The 'far-left' and the 'twitter-left' (or the tik-tok left) are not all quite the same thing either. I don't think you can draw much conclusions about people outside of a platform based on either Twitter or TikTok.
- stetrain 1y ago
  It never really stopped. All of Elon's crying about bots stopped as soon as he took ownership.
- sojsurf 1y ago
  I went back recently. Maybe I'm in the wrong circles, but I'm seeing neither of these. I _am_ still seeing lots of recycled content looking for clicks.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  He fixed the bot problem, the problem of Twitter banning Elon's bots.
fouc 1y ago
Reading that I couldn't help but think there's parallels to HN. At least HN tries to be transparent about "the algorithm", and it's essentially a dumb algorithm compared to what X/FB/etc use.
- joseda-hg 1y ago
  I think it's fundamentally different in HN, everyone sees the same posts/comments (Barring settings / mod privileges), but in X everyone can get a slightly tailored feed
  - Clubber 1y ago
    I'm sure there's coordinated efforts to up/downvote content on HN. The political articles are way up and certain reasonable comments seem to be unreasonably downvoted. It seems like it's ramped up since the election. Either that or HN is becoming a natural echo chamber, I'm not quite sure. If people don't already know, the internet is easily manipulated and people tend to get ideas and reassurances of ideas based on what their group's opinions are, and those opinions are manipulated. It's easy to create multiple accounts, easy to change IP addresses, easy to bot comments; anyone can do it and it's easy to automate. The earliest example I can recall was manipulating the Amazon ratings system, now it's everywhere.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  "The Algorithm" on most social media platforms to which people apply that term is, crucially, personalized, and (usually) heavily driven by engagement metrics. That's what makes them dangerous and shitty, not just having a voting system or sorting by latest post ("technically an algorithm!" as some posters will helpfully point out in these kinds of discussions)
- kuschkufan 1y ago
  on hn the algorithm boosts/hides posts and comments based on the popularity of the user account that upvoted/downvoted? i thought all accounts had the same voting weight.
gruez 1y ago
I'm surprised how many upvotes this got (40 points as of me writing this comment), given how little "meat" is actually in this article. The author presents a graph where views for a given user dropped precipitously after a "feud with musk". That's certainly suspicious, and was worth bringing up, but the rest of the blog is just pontificating about "social engineering" and "perception cascades", backed by absolutely nothing. Are people just upvoting based on title and maybe the first paragraph? This post could have been truncated to the graph and very little would be lost.
- freehorse 1y ago
  Yeah I also hoped that the article had some more backing for these arguments. The nytimes article, which is cited and from which the first graph is from, is more interesting, as it also includes a couple more cases: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon-musk-x-suppression-laura-loomer.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon... or from webarchive https://web.archive.org/web/20250423093911/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon-musk-x-suppression-laura-loomer.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250423093911/https://www.nytim...
- janalsncm 1y ago
  EM directly manipulates the algorithm to suit his interests. Here’s one we know about: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk-changes-twitter-algorithm-super-bowl-slump-report https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
  - ruleryak 1y ago
    This article does not offer any proof. It's hearsay, from the title saying he "reportedly" forced it, in turn citing a Platformer article that itself also provides no proof and instead accepts the stories from fired engineers as gospel. The platformer article then goes on to say that views still fluctuate wildly, and that it isn't in line with a supposed 1000x boost. The same Platformer article then says that they believe the supposed 1000x boost is no longer in effect, but they guess something else must be in place. The Guardian article doesn't bother to mention that part.
qnleigh 1y ago
Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? The article only shows one plot of one specific instance, and there could be more than one explanation for the sudden drop in viewership (especially given the involvement of Twitter's owner).
- a2128 1y ago
  Below the chart there's a link to a NYTimes article it was sourced from, which has more plots of more instances of this
- janalsncm 1y ago
  Their “for you” feed is engagement bait. In other words, it appears to be running almost entirely on CTR. It seems to pull from a pool of posts that are engaged with by those you follow. Limit seems to be 24h. It’s not a very sophisticated algorithm, likely because the best people aren’t super keen on working there for WLB reasons.
- jsheard 1y ago
  > Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? Funnily enough we should know that, since Elon promised to open source the algorithm in the name of transparency. But what actually happened is they dropped a one-time snapshot onto GitHub two years ago, never updated it, and never acknowledged it again. Many such cases.
  - hashstring 1y ago
    Yes, this 100%. And never forgot the, isElon boolean var that would increase post visibility. lol, what a shame.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    It was enough info that people who professionally post on X/Twitter can play the algorithm like a fiddle. They can get anything they want to the top, and often can even get Elon to re-tweet it.
a_c 1y ago
Neuro network mimics human brain, what fires together wires together. X mimics human psychology (still brain). Call it halo effect, appeal to authority, selection bias. Some say it is a bug, some say it is a feature, a feature in decision making that developed under limited time and energy. Selecting X, but not other social network, as the subject of the article is a selection bias, it is also a feature, so is X's selection of sorting criteria
janalsncm 1y ago
The low effort boosting replies are what get me. A lot of tech billionaires (who supposedly work harder than any mortal) spend a ton of time with one word / emoji replies. At least this is visible boosting. The next step is to boost behind the scenes, entirely unauditable. All of the power (and more) of an editor, none of the accountability.
- RankingMember 1y ago
  The "author_is_elon" flag in Twitter's source code comes to mind
riffic 1y ago
It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a governance structure that made it immune to such an attack…
  - riffic 1y ago
    poorly thought out aspirations then. Many of the communication outlets through this utility have as well their own web infrastructure, hopefully serving as a single source of truth, whether that looks like wsj.com or whitehouse.gov. Interestingly enough the W3C has a recommendation to publish activities through an interoperable manner. There's even talk of putting the Bluesky protocol through whatever process the IETF uses to create a request for comments.
    - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      It’s “poorly thought out” to want there to exist truly public infrastructure that’s of the rough shape of Twitter? I personally would love not having every viable tool of propaganda owned by private interests totally free of any Constitutional obligations. A public utility Twitter would surely be inferior in many ways, but IMO would be a useful counterbalance to have in the mix of platform options. Your comment makes sense if the social value of Twitter was exclusively posting links from other actual sources of truth, but it’s not. That’s not even the primary source of social value in a free society (it’s the dialogue).
  - woooooo 1y ago
arrowsmith 1y ago
Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?
- trollied 1y ago
  HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central. BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.
  - selectodude 1y ago
    If twitter is “central”, what on gods earth do you consider “right of center”?
    - dpedu 1y ago
      4chan or any of the chans, or the site the /r/the_donald folks moved to after reddit banned it? Or Voat, but that's gone now?
    - rayiner 1y ago
      X users say that the content they see is roughly equally likely to be liberal or conservative: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/06/12/how-x-users-view-experience-the-platform/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/06/12/how-x-users-... (look at the chart: Political content users see on X)
      - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        This was last June. As of March 2024 Musk was still saying he wouldn't donate to either candidate. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-says-he-wont-donate-either-us-presidential-candidate-2024-03-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-says-he-wont-donate-ei... and it wasn't until July that Elon made himself a liar and endorsed/funded Trump. Not sure how relevant your link is in light of Elon effectively going back on everything he said/committed to previously and buying the Presidency.
aeturnum 1y ago
> Social proof used to reflect crowd wisdom. Now it reflects algorithmic endorsement — triggered not by consensus, but by proximity to influence. A single interaction can distort scale, making selected content appear widely supported. I think this is barking up the right tree with the wrong lesson - these things are the same. Elon Musk, for worse mostly, is a social influencer. You can tell because a lot of people follow him. I am sure the algorithm in unreasonably kind to him (as he can write it) but it's also true that a lot of people care what he does and what he does changes what people care about. The real question here, to me, is: does this kind of mass social calculus make any kind of real sense? Can we actually extend the idea of interest to 219,000,000 people or do we leave the coordinate system at some point? I suspect it doesn't hold up. I am a long time believer in the need for good algorithmic filtering. There is more happening in the world than I have attention for and I want a machine to help me. Most solutions are quite bad because they are focused on how much money they can make instead of how much they can help. But I think it's a real problem and the bad, money-grubbing algorithms that surround us now are making our lives much worse. Ultimately I think this comes back to operationalizing human relationships. What does it math for Musk to have that many followers? This is distasteful but real, I fear, in the age we live. Social influence is clearly real and we are measuring it in flawed ways and we should try and improve those flawed measurements.
- janalsncm 1y ago
  Jake Paul is a social influencer. His posts show up from organic engagement. Elon Musk owns the platform. He directly dictates how it works. He ordered engineers to boost his posts by a factor of 1000. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets... Whether some people like EM’s posts is beside the point. It’s manufactured.
  - derektank 1y ago
    Elon Musk had 85 million followers in 2022[1] before he acquired Twitter. He obviously has some organic engagement / grassroots appeal, separate from whatever benefits he derives from owning the platform. [1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Elon-Musk https://www.britannica.com/money/Elon-Musk
mrdoops 1y ago
Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.
- ty6853 1y ago
  The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.
  - cmdli 1y ago
    In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.
    - ty6853 1y ago
      Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.
      - krapp 1y ago
        The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President. The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been impossible.
timewizard 1y ago
Genuine social interaction is not profitable. Trying to achieve this on a for profit platform is pure folly. These are time wasting machines and were never truly capable of being more than that particularly once their use base reached a size where monthly churn no longer impacts the bottom line of advertising revenue.
devrandoom 1y ago
X is a cult. People I know are being totally brainwashed. There so much misinformation, fabrication and half truths out there. Repeateted over and over again in various forms. When the full story surfaces two days later, they'll never see that on their cult hub.
zoogeny 1y ago
It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies. We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.
- Jordan-117 1y ago
  It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v/announcements/100313 https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v... That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding. You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    AKA the “Nazi bar” problem. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
    - kmeisthax 1y ago
hadrien01 1y ago
The images from the article don't seem to load, I get a NS_ERROR_REDIRECT_LOOP according to the devtools
tonetegeatinst 1y ago
Wouldn't that random tweet about the tariff pause that caused a market crash be an outlier if not proof this isn't always true? Random obscure account tweets about a 90 day pause...a few people talk about it....and suddenly news outlets ran with it and the markets freaked out.
bromuk 1y ago
Interesting
wetpaws 1y ago
[dead]
renewiltord 1y ago
What's fascinating about Twitter is watching as everyone who claimed it was going to collapse without a few SREs is now talking about how it's too powerful and controls opinion.
w10-1 1y ago
Is the title ironic? Is this helping? "Manufacturing consent", the book by Chomsky and Herman, details techniques that are largely unused in this situation. Chomsky's book by disclosing the hidden editor works against the effect rather than for it. Here it's closer to a state-run media outlet, with the exact ambiguity that implies: a known editor pretending to be objective, except here the editor only really cares about certain topics, and others are encouraged to roam freely (if traceably). In Chomsky's case, the editor's power comes from being covert, but only if people are fooled, so the book works to diminish it. In this case, the power comes from the editor being known unstoppable. You have to accept it and know yourself as accepting it -- which means you have to buy in as a fan to avoid seeing yourself as herded, or out yourself as an outsider. Since most people take the default step of doing nothing, they get accumulating evidence of themselves as herded or a fan. It's a forcing function (like "you're with us or against us") that conditions acceptance rather than manufacturing consent. In this case, articles (showing what happens when you oppose the editor) and ensuing discussions like this (ending in no-action) have the reinforcing effect of empowering the editor, and increase the self-censuring effects. They contribute to the aim and effect of conditioning acceptance. So they might not be helpful. (Better would be the abandonment of a platform when it fails to fulfill fairness claims, but that's hard to engineer.)
- notfed 1y ago
  "Manufacturing consensus" is, at least, the title of a separate book more appropriately fitting the theme of the article.
Synaesthesia 1y ago
Exact same thing happens on Facebook. There are certain posts and ideas which are expressly forbidden, others which are discouraged and ones which are boosted.
torlok 1y ago
Why does this article talk about generic "influential people" influencing "the algorithm"? Didn't Musk force Twitter engineers on a Sunday night to artificially boost him after he got less views than the president? What's the evidence that this is some kind of a general issue, and not just the owner being petty.
languid-photic 1y ago
[dead]
whalesalad 1y ago
Spend ten minutes on X with a new account and this is clear as day. It’s one of the most surreal communities on earth at this point. Everything is gaslighting/hyperbole.
- jandrese 1y ago
  What is most amazing it to see what Elon retweets, often with just a single word followup. It's the most batshit stuff you've ever seen. Or just blatantly obvious propaganda. And people call him a genius. It's like the world is bowing down at the altar of your drunkest most racist uncle.
  - whalesalad 1y ago
    Have you seen "his" leaked 4chan account? Most insane shit I have ever read in my life. Here is a mirror ... the poster says multiple times that they are the owner of twitter. https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/tripcode/%21SATANZ0Gpo/page/1/ https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/tripcode/%21SATANZ0Gpo... Along with many other things like heil hitler. Assuming this is actually his account, he is 100% a nazi.
Joking_Phantom 1y ago
Every social media platform is manipulated by it's owners and elites. There's no way to get around it, not when your KPIs are user engagement and advertising dollars. Twitter has become a particularly nasty version of it. In the before times, Google, Twitter, Reddit, etc. usually spent their efforts trying to manipulate things in a mostly benign way. If you like free markets, then you must be opposed to Twitter. This is a market controlled by a few. Competition is rigorously hunted down. Lies and fake social proof packaged into "free speech." Only the chosen ones are allowed audience. This is the opposite of capitalism. This is the worst of cronyism. Force switching all accounts to unfollow Democracts and follow Republicans and Elon, signal boosting right wing conspiracy theorists, blocking or suspending left or liberal accounts, it's just naked power centralization all the way down...
627467 1y ago
The article’s angst over X’s “manufactured consensus” is overblown. Influence has always been curated—editors, town criers, or whoever grabbed the mic were the analog algorithms. X’s sin isn’t some evil algo: it’s just running at planetary scale. We’ve ditched thousands of small communities for one global shouting match, so naturally mega-influencers steal the show. Algorithms are just the gears keeping this chaos moving because we crave instant, worldwide chatter. Some folks pretend a perfect algorithm exists (bsky, IG/fb) but it doesn’t come from one team, one database, or one set of criteria. The “perfect” system is a messy web of different algorithms in different spaces, barely connected, each with its own context. Calling out X’s code misses the mark. We signed up for this planetary circus and keep buying tickets.
- throwaway7783 1y ago
  But there is no denying that there is a shift in narrative in X posts since its acquisition. So there is certainly more going on than just planetary scale. It was planetary scale before acquisition too. Algorithms have the power to nudge the narrative one way or another at planetary scale.
  - EcommerceFlow 1y ago
    Yes, the natural order (that was mass censored for 10+ years) got uncensored. Look at who won the presidency.
    - throwaway7783 1y ago
      No way of telling one way or another, no? Unless you actually work at X and know exactly how it works. Note - My original comment was not about whether now is worse than before or vice versa. It is just that narratives shifted in a different way, that had nothing to do with scale. Algorithms are just as likely as uncensored (or censored - how does one know?)
  - ljsprague 1y ago
    It was completely transparent and unbiased before its acquisition.
casenmgreen 1y ago
It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are spammed by hate bots and then making those posts visible. https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lkjabe5wmk2v https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk... I've also seen evidence of posts Twitter likes (violent and hateful anti-immigration posts - literally a photo of a dummy tied to a chair being shot in the back of the head) being spammed by love bots. Twitter seems to be a propaganda channel, run by Donald/Elon/et al.
- numpad0 1y ago
  Yeah, artificial delays in content delivery is silently spreading. It's not just Twitter. Edit: is this why 4chan was hit with the disruption - because there's no room for this delay mechanism?
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    No, 4chan was hacked because hideyuki has terrible security hygiene and didn't update shit. Same thing happened to 2channel a decade prior.
- OmarShehata 1y ago
  important notes from the essay, this not unique to twitter: > And if you think this only happens on one social network, you’re already caught in the wrong attention loop. > The most effective influence doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t censor loudly, or boost aggressively. It shapes perception quietly — one algorithmic nudge at a time.
  - readhistory 1y ago
    FWIW, I don't think the person you are responding to said it only happens on Twitter. Just that it happens on Twitter.
  - awkwabear 1y ago
    This definitely happens on other platforms as well but there is a key difference in noting that twitter is now privately owned by a single person who has shown themself to be insecure and prone to lashing publicly at critics. I think twitter is uniquely concentrated in its influence by its owner and willingness to do things so blatantly, other platforms need to at least pretend to not steer things so directly as not to upset shareholders.
gmd63 1y ago
Metrics on X have lost all of their credibility since Elon took over. The guy likely juices his own numbers, floods posts he likes with botted engagement, etc. Likes are private so he can delude Trumpers into thinking they're popular in a sea of bots.
ein0p 1y ago
Looking at the comments, the blowback to this is pretty wonderful to see. There's hope for HN after all. More and more people are realizing that they don't have to blindly subscribe to the "current thing".
o1inventor 1y ago
Spend a decade crying wolf or "muh fascists" at every little thing we disagree with, and suddenly everyone is surprised when the public tunes it out and we get fascists. "who made you this way?" "you did." - american politics circa 2025
- piperswe 1y ago
  I mean, the fascists today are basically the same people as the fascists 10 years ago. It wasn't crying wolf, it was seeing what was going to happen in the future.
  - o1inventor 1y ago
    If I tell a young black man he is gonna grow up to be a criminal, that makes him more likely to grow up to become a criminal. Especially if I refuse to debate him and instead hurl insults at him and viciously deride him. The same is true of the ordinary and the middle-of-the-road people when it comes to fascism. The best way to create fascists is to attack and histrionically go after non-fascists and demand they conform to our way of thought. Just being left-wing and going after people out of disgust over their opinions, I've accidentally alienated more people and created more fascists than any of these limp-wrist right-wing conservatives could ever hope to create. I only realized it years later. Radicalism begets radicalism.
mcintyre1994 1y ago
I wonder if the algorithm is affected by blocking the high profile account in these cases. Eg I blocked Musk ages ago because if you don’t then the algorithm just constantly pushes his ‘content’ at you. So does the algorithm still prioritise things he’s interacted with for me, or does it only do that for people who haven’t blocked him? I definitely get stuff recommended that I expect he might interact with, but I don’t know if that’s actually specifically why it’s being pushed at me.
- numpad0 1y ago
  They've massively raised various penalization thresholds too, so that organically valued content cannot gain popularity. Unless you've blocked everything he sees, you're still affected.
jadbox 1y ago
Just my personal antidotal experience, my reach on X in the last six months has tanked more than 10-100x and my usage hasn't really changed. At this point, I feel my reach has basically dropped to near zero unless some "big name influencer" boosts it with a comment.
neilv 1y ago
> When an account with 219 million followers interacts with a smaller one — not by blocking or arguing, but simply by muting — the consequences are immediate. The smaller account’s visibility drops from 150,000 views to 20,000 overnight. Is this true on Twitter/X? If so, what is the rationale?
- numpad0 1y ago
  Lots of people report those kinds of massive deboosting and visibility penalties, and constantly devising avoidance strategies. There are no trivially inferred rationale as with lots of things going on in the world, unless destruction of value were the goal.
- Shekelphile 1y ago
  There were more than a few cases at the time around acquisition where Musk publicly got into autistic manbaby slapfights with people on twitter and ended up banning them publicly. Presumably he is choosing to avoid doing this to mask what is happening to the victim and to avoid more bad press about it - it directly harms his thinly veiled persona as a free speech absolutist.
jhp123 1y ago
I wouldn't think you need any deep insight or analysis to understand that a media site privately held by a government official is propaganda
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
In this modern era we heave under the weight of decades of exponential growth. In some cases it’s actually “only” compound growth - but the result has been the same (and very ironic): ossification through stratification. There are behemoths living among us. There will soon be social media accounts with enough sway to manufacture truth. What needs to be learned is society is like a national park. Left to its own devices it will end up trashed - people leave garbage, move in and use it for whatever they like. So, we fund a service that keeps parks maintained. We understand the benefits of the National Park Service because they are visible and we are visual creatures. But for some reason we have a more laissez-faire attitude to unchecked accumulation and its downstream effects. It’s risky for power to be so concentrated. We’re forced to hope for benevolence and there’s no backup plan. What more can be done to show the orders of magnitude of difference between the most and least powerful?
hammock 1y ago
This is a good summary of psyops currently in use by all sides of US and foreign governments and private interests against the American people, and applies to all forms of media, not just Twitter.
-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
Is there a curated and serious resource from any public body or private individual documenting specific cases of abuse by Twitter? Any links greatly appreciated.
hamilyon2 1y ago
MeowMeowBeenz or Nosedive, in real world
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Avlin67 1y ago
i think it is the same with reddit

317 points by cogitovirus 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

MaxPock 1y ago

X is once again full of bots selling crypto and financial services .

josefritzishere 1y ago
It's really degenerated into a trash heap. I quit years ago.
- mmastrac 1y ago
  I pop in from time to time but I only ever see right-wing rage bait (??) and my old timeline is completely gone. I don't engage with any of it either, just scrolling until I finally catch a name I recognize and maybe dropping a like.
  - FredPret 1y ago
    There's also left-wing rage bait if you scroll down. It's sad that these social media companies supplanted proper journalism, only to then rot into this. What do we have now?
  - Shekelphile 1y ago
    And even on tweets that don't seem to be outwardly ragebait the top replies will always be from blue checked right wing accounts, of course.
arrowsmith 1y ago
Hey, that's not fair! It's also full of porn bots and Holocaust denial.
- jjeaff 1y ago
  Don't forget the graphic fight videos with comments full of racial undertones. I have literally never engaged with nor watched more than a few seconds of those types of videos yet my feed is full of them.
  - vvpan 1y ago
    Ah yes the "look at what brown people are doing to our cities" accounts... One of the main reasons I am not on there anymore.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    It's to radicalize people into becoming racists.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  Every platform has Holocaust denial because that's the one thing that the far-left and far-right both agree on...
  - RankingMember 1y ago
    The far-left denies the Holocaust? On what grounds?
    - dismalaf 1y ago
      It's usually some mental gymnastics related to Israel, Gaza, etc... Because many Muslims deny the holocaust, much of the far-left has co-opted that rhetoric. It's super visible on TikTok, for example. Edit - some comments below this seem to doubt. Just go on TikTok to politically charged posts about Palestine. This whole thread is about social media. Not holocaust denial on the mainstream left, specifically the far-left on social media
      - seadan83 1y ago
        Sounds like sampling bias TBH. The 'far-left' and the 'twitter-left' (or the tik-tok left) are not all quite the same thing either. I don't think you can draw much conclusions about people outside of a platform based on either Twitter or TikTok.
stetrain 1y ago
It never really stopped. All of Elon's crying about bots stopped as soon as he took ownership.
sojsurf 1y ago
I went back recently. Maybe I'm in the wrong circles, but I'm seeing neither of these. I _am_ still seeing lots of recycled content looking for clicks.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
He fixed the bot problem, the problem of Twitter banning Elon's bots.

fouc 1y ago

Reading that I couldn't help but think there's parallels to HN. At least HN tries to be transparent about "the algorithm", and it's essentially a dumb algorithm compared to what X/FB/etc use.

joseda-hg 1y ago
I think it's fundamentally different in HN, everyone sees the same posts/comments (Barring settings / mod privileges), but in X everyone can get a slightly tailored feed
- Clubber 1y ago
  I'm sure there's coordinated efforts to up/downvote content on HN. The political articles are way up and certain reasonable comments seem to be unreasonably downvoted. It seems like it's ramped up since the election. Either that or HN is becoming a natural echo chamber, I'm not quite sure. If people don't already know, the internet is easily manipulated and people tend to get ideas and reassurances of ideas based on what their group's opinions are, and those opinions are manipulated. It's easy to create multiple accounts, easy to change IP addresses, easy to bot comments; anyone can do it and it's easy to automate. The earliest example I can recall was manipulating the Amazon ratings system, now it's everywhere.
alabastervlog 1y ago
"The Algorithm" on most social media platforms to which people apply that term is, crucially, personalized, and (usually) heavily driven by engagement metrics. That's what makes them dangerous and shitty, not just having a voting system or sorting by latest post ("technically an algorithm!" as some posters will helpfully point out in these kinds of discussions)
kuschkufan 1y ago
on hn the algorithm boosts/hides posts and comments based on the popularity of the user account that upvoted/downvoted? i thought all accounts had the same voting weight.

gruez 1y ago

I'm surprised how many upvotes this got (40 points as of me writing this comment), given how little "meat" is actually in this article. The author presents a graph where views for a given user dropped precipitously after a "feud with musk". That's certainly suspicious, and was worth bringing up, but the rest of the blog is just pontificating about "social engineering" and "perception cascades", backed by absolutely nothing. Are people just upvoting based on title and maybe the first paragraph? This post could have been truncated to the graph and very little would be lost.

freehorse 1y ago
Yeah I also hoped that the article had some more backing for these arguments. The nytimes article, which is cited and from which the first graph is from, is more interesting, as it also includes a couple more cases: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon-musk-x-suppression-laura-loomer.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon... or from webarchive https://web.archive.org/web/20250423093911/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon-musk-x-suppression-laura-loomer.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250423093911/https://www.nytim...
janalsncm 1y ago
EM directly manipulates the algorithm to suit his interests. Here’s one we know about: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk-changes-twitter-algorithm-super-bowl-slump-report https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
- ruleryak 1y ago
  This article does not offer any proof. It's hearsay, from the title saying he "reportedly" forced it, in turn citing a Platformer article that itself also provides no proof and instead accepts the stories from fired engineers as gospel. The platformer article then goes on to say that views still fluctuate wildly, and that it isn't in line with a supposed 1000x boost. The same Platformer article then says that they believe the supposed 1000x boost is no longer in effect, but they guess something else must be in place. The Guardian article doesn't bother to mention that part.

qnleigh 1y ago

Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? The article only shows one plot of one specific instance, and there could be more than one explanation for the sudden drop in viewership (especially given the involvement of Twitter's owner).

a2128 1y ago
Below the chart there's a link to a NYTimes article it was sourced from, which has more plots of more instances of this
janalsncm 1y ago
Their “for you” feed is engagement bait. In other words, it appears to be running almost entirely on CTR. It seems to pull from a pool of posts that are engaged with by those you follow. Limit seems to be 24h. It’s not a very sophisticated algorithm, likely because the best people aren’t super keen on working there for WLB reasons.
jsheard 1y ago
> Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? Funnily enough we should know that, since Elon promised to open source the algorithm in the name of transparency. But what actually happened is they dropped a one-time snapshot onto GitHub two years ago, never updated it, and never acknowledged it again. Many such cases.
- hashstring 1y ago
  Yes, this 100%. And never forgot the, isElon boolean var that would increase post visibility. lol, what a shame.
- jandrese 1y ago
  It was enough info that people who professionally post on X/Twitter can play the algorithm like a fiddle. They can get anything they want to the top, and often can even get Elon to re-tweet it.

a_c 1y ago

Neuro network mimics human brain, what fires together wires together. X mimics human psychology (still brain). Call it halo effect, appeal to authority, selection bias. Some say it is a bug, some say it is a feature, a feature in decision making that developed under limited time and energy. Selecting X, but not other social network, as the subject of the article is a selection bias, it is also a feature, so is X's selection of sorting criteria

janalsncm 1y ago

The low effort boosting replies are what get me. A lot of tech billionaires (who supposedly work harder than any mortal) spend a ton of time with one word / emoji replies. At least this is visible boosting. The next step is to boost behind the scenes, entirely unauditable. All of the power (and more) of an editor, none of the accountability.

RankingMember 1y ago
The "author_is_elon" flag in Twitter's source code comes to mind

riffic 1y ago

It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

sorcerer-mar 1y ago
Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a governance structure that made it immune to such an attack…
- riffic 1y ago
  poorly thought out aspirations then. Many of the communication outlets through this utility have as well their own web infrastructure, hopefully serving as a single source of truth, whether that looks like wsj.com or whitehouse.gov. Interestingly enough the W3C has a recommendation to publish activities through an interoperable manner. There's even talk of putting the Bluesky protocol through whatever process the IETF uses to create a request for comments.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    It’s “poorly thought out” to want there to exist truly public infrastructure that’s of the rough shape of Twitter? I personally would love not having every viable tool of propaganda owned by private interests totally free of any Constitutional obligations. A public utility Twitter would surely be inferior in many ways, but IMO would be a useful counterbalance to have in the mix of platform options. Your comment makes sense if the social value of Twitter was exclusively posting links from other actual sources of truth, but it’s not. That’s not even the primary source of social value in a free society (it’s the dialogue).
- woooooo 1y ago

arrowsmith 1y ago

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

trollied 1y ago
HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central. BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.
- selectodude 1y ago
  If twitter is “central”, what on gods earth do you consider “right of center”?
  - dpedu 1y ago
    4chan or any of the chans, or the site the /r/the_donald folks moved to after reddit banned it? Or Voat, but that's gone now?
  - rayiner 1y ago
    X users say that the content they see is roughly equally likely to be liberal or conservative: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/06/12/how-x-users-view-experience-the-platform/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/06/12/how-x-users-... (look at the chart: Political content users see on X)
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      This was last June. As of March 2024 Musk was still saying he wouldn't donate to either candidate. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-says-he-wont-donate-either-us-presidential-candidate-2024-03-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-says-he-wont-donate-ei... and it wasn't until July that Elon made himself a liar and endorsed/funded Trump. Not sure how relevant your link is in light of Elon effectively going back on everything he said/committed to previously and buying the Presidency.

aeturnum 1y ago

> Social proof used to reflect crowd wisdom. Now it reflects algorithmic endorsement — triggered not by consensus, but by proximity to influence. A single interaction can distort scale, making selected content appear widely supported. I think this is barking up the right tree with the wrong lesson - these things are the same. Elon Musk, for worse mostly, is a social influencer. You can tell because a lot of people follow him. I am sure the algorithm in unreasonably kind to him (as he can write it) but it's also true that a lot of people care what he does and what he does changes what people care about. The real question here, to me, is: does this kind of mass social calculus make any kind of real sense? Can we actually extend the idea of interest to 219,000,000 people or do we leave the coordinate system at some point? I suspect it doesn't hold up. I am a long time believer in the need for good algorithmic filtering. There is more happening in the world than I have attention for and I want a machine to help me. Most solutions are quite bad because they are focused on how much money they can make instead of how much they can help. But I think it's a real problem and the bad, money-grubbing algorithms that surround us now are making our lives much worse. Ultimately I think this comes back to operationalizing human relationships. What does it math for Musk to have that many followers? This is distasteful but real, I fear, in the age we live. Social influence is clearly real and we are measuring it in flawed ways and we should try and improve those flawed measurements.

janalsncm 1y ago
Jake Paul is a social influencer. His posts show up from organic engagement. Elon Musk owns the platform. He directly dictates how it works. He ordered engineers to boost his posts by a factor of 1000. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets... Whether some people like EM’s posts is beside the point. It’s manufactured.
- derektank 1y ago
  Elon Musk had 85 million followers in 2022[1] before he acquired Twitter. He obviously has some organic engagement / grassroots appeal, separate from whatever benefits he derives from owning the platform. [1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Elon-Musk https://www.britannica.com/money/Elon-Musk

mrdoops 1y ago

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

ty6853 1y ago
The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.
- cmdli 1y ago
  In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.
    - krapp 1y ago
      The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President. The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been impossible.

timewizard 1y ago

Genuine social interaction is not profitable. Trying to achieve this on a for profit platform is pure folly. These are time wasting machines and were never truly capable of being more than that particularly once their use base reached a size where monthly churn no longer impacts the bottom line of advertising revenue.

devrandoom 1y ago

X is a cult. People I know are being totally brainwashed. There so much misinformation, fabrication and half truths out there. Repeateted over and over again in various forms. When the full story surfaces two days later, they'll never see that on their cult hub.

zoogeny 1y ago

It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies. We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.

Jordan-117 1y ago
It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/ But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation: https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v/announcements/100313 https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v... That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/ The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding. You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  AKA the “Nazi bar” problem. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
  - kmeisthax 1y ago

hadrien01 1y ago

The images from the article don't seem to load, I get a NS_ERROR_REDIRECT_LOOP according to the devtools

tonetegeatinst 1y ago

Wouldn't that random tweet about the tariff pause that caused a market crash be an outlier if not proof this isn't always true? Random obscure account tweets about a 90 day pause...a few people talk about it....and suddenly news outlets ran with it and the markets freaked out.

bromuk 1y ago

Interesting

wetpaws 1y ago

[dead]

renewiltord 1y ago

What's fascinating about Twitter is watching as everyone who claimed it was going to collapse without a few SREs is now talking about how it's too powerful and controls opinion.

w10-1 1y ago

Is the title ironic? Is this helping? "Manufacturing consent", the book by Chomsky and Herman, details techniques that are largely unused in this situation. Chomsky's book by disclosing the hidden editor works against the effect rather than for it. Here it's closer to a state-run media outlet, with the exact ambiguity that implies: a known editor pretending to be objective, except here the editor only really cares about certain topics, and others are encouraged to roam freely (if traceably). In Chomsky's case, the editor's power comes from being covert, but only if people are fooled, so the book works to diminish it. In this case, the power comes from the editor being known unstoppable. You have to accept it and know yourself as accepting it -- which means you have to buy in as a fan to avoid seeing yourself as herded, or out yourself as an outsider. Since most people take the default step of doing nothing, they get accumulating evidence of themselves as herded or a fan. It's a forcing function (like "you're with us or against us") that conditions acceptance rather than manufacturing consent. In this case, articles (showing what happens when you oppose the editor) and ensuing discussions like this (ending in no-action) have the reinforcing effect of empowering the editor, and increase the self-censuring effects. They contribute to the aim and effect of conditioning acceptance. So they might not be helpful. (Better would be the abandonment of a platform when it fails to fulfill fairness claims, but that's hard to engineer.)

notfed 1y ago
"Manufacturing consensus" is, at least, the title of a separate book more appropriately fitting the theme of the article.

Synaesthesia 1y ago

Exact same thing happens on Facebook. There are certain posts and ideas which are expressly forbidden, others which are discouraged and ones which are boosted.

torlok 1y ago

Why does this article talk about generic "influential people" influencing "the algorithm"? Didn't Musk force Twitter engineers on a Sunday night to artificially boost him after he got less views than the president? What's the evidence that this is some kind of a general issue, and not just the owner being petty.

languid-photic 1y ago

[dead]

whalesalad 1y ago

Spend ten minutes on X with a new account and this is clear as day. It’s one of the most surreal communities on earth at this point. Everything is gaslighting/hyperbole.

jandrese 1y ago
What is most amazing it to see what Elon retweets, often with just a single word followup. It's the most batshit stuff you've ever seen. Or just blatantly obvious propaganda. And people call him a genius. It's like the world is bowing down at the altar of your drunkest most racist uncle.
- whalesalad 1y ago
  Have you seen "his" leaked 4chan account? Most insane shit I have ever read in my life. Here is a mirror ... the poster says multiple times that they are the owner of twitter. https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/tripcode/%21SATANZ0Gpo/page/1/ https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/tripcode/%21SATANZ0Gpo... Along with many other things like heil hitler. Assuming this is actually his account, he is 100% a nazi.

Joking_Phantom 1y ago

Every social media platform is manipulated by it's owners and elites. There's no way to get around it, not when your KPIs are user engagement and advertising dollars. Twitter has become a particularly nasty version of it. In the before times, Google, Twitter, Reddit, etc. usually spent their efforts trying to manipulate things in a mostly benign way. If you like free markets, then you must be opposed to Twitter. This is a market controlled by a few. Competition is rigorously hunted down. Lies and fake social proof packaged into "free speech." Only the chosen ones are allowed audience. This is the opposite of capitalism. This is the worst of cronyism. Force switching all accounts to unfollow Democracts and follow Republicans and Elon, signal boosting right wing conspiracy theorists, blocking or suspending left or liberal accounts, it's just naked power centralization all the way down...

627467 1y ago

The article’s angst over X’s “manufactured consensus” is overblown. Influence has always been curated—editors, town criers, or whoever grabbed the mic were the analog algorithms. X’s sin isn’t some evil algo: it’s just running at planetary scale. We’ve ditched thousands of small communities for one global shouting match, so naturally mega-influencers steal the show. Algorithms are just the gears keeping this chaos moving because we crave instant, worldwide chatter. Some folks pretend a perfect algorithm exists (bsky, IG/fb) but it doesn’t come from one team, one database, or one set of criteria. The “perfect” system is a messy web of different algorithms in different spaces, barely connected, each with its own context. Calling out X’s code misses the mark. We signed up for this planetary circus and keep buying tickets.

throwaway7783 1y ago
But there is no denying that there is a shift in narrative in X posts since its acquisition. So there is certainly more going on than just planetary scale. It was planetary scale before acquisition too. Algorithms have the power to nudge the narrative one way or another at planetary scale.
- EcommerceFlow 1y ago
  Yes, the natural order (that was mass censored for 10+ years) got uncensored. Look at who won the presidency.
  - throwaway7783 1y ago
    No way of telling one way or another, no? Unless you actually work at X and know exactly how it works. Note - My original comment was not about whether now is worse than before or vice versa. It is just that narratives shifted in a different way, that had nothing to do with scale. Algorithms are just as likely as uncensored (or censored - how does one know?)
- ljsprague 1y ago
  It was completely transparent and unbiased before its acquisition.

casenmgreen 1y ago

It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are spammed by hate bots and then making those posts visible. https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lkjabe5wmk2v https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk... I've also seen evidence of posts Twitter likes (violent and hateful anti-immigration posts - literally a photo of a dummy tied to a chair being shot in the back of the head) being spammed by love bots. Twitter seems to be a propaganda channel, run by Donald/Elon/et al.

numpad0 1y ago
Yeah, artificial delays in content delivery is silently spreading. It's not just Twitter. Edit: is this why 4chan was hit with the disruption - because there's no room for this delay mechanism?
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  No, 4chan was hacked because hideyuki has terrible security hygiene and didn't update shit. Same thing happened to 2channel a decade prior.
OmarShehata 1y ago
important notes from the essay, this not unique to twitter: > And if you think this only happens on one social network, you’re already caught in the wrong attention loop. > The most effective influence doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t censor loudly, or boost aggressively. It shapes perception quietly — one algorithmic nudge at a time.
- readhistory 1y ago
  FWIW, I don't think the person you are responding to said it only happens on Twitter. Just that it happens on Twitter.
- awkwabear 1y ago
  This definitely happens on other platforms as well but there is a key difference in noting that twitter is now privately owned by a single person who has shown themself to be insecure and prone to lashing publicly at critics. I think twitter is uniquely concentrated in its influence by its owner and willingness to do things so blatantly, other platforms need to at least pretend to not steer things so directly as not to upset shareholders.

gmd63 1y ago

Metrics on X have lost all of their credibility since Elon took over. The guy likely juices his own numbers, floods posts he likes with botted engagement, etc. Likes are private so he can delude Trumpers into thinking they're popular in a sea of bots.

ein0p 1y ago

Looking at the comments, the blowback to this is pretty wonderful to see. There's hope for HN after all. More and more people are realizing that they don't have to blindly subscribe to the "current thing".

o1inventor 1y ago

Spend a decade crying wolf or "muh fascists" at every little thing we disagree with, and suddenly everyone is surprised when the public tunes it out and we get fascists. "who made you this way?" "you did." - american politics circa 2025

piperswe 1y ago
I mean, the fascists today are basically the same people as the fascists 10 years ago. It wasn't crying wolf, it was seeing what was going to happen in the future.
- o1inventor 1y ago
  If I tell a young black man he is gonna grow up to be a criminal, that makes him more likely to grow up to become a criminal. Especially if I refuse to debate him and instead hurl insults at him and viciously deride him. The same is true of the ordinary and the middle-of-the-road people when it comes to fascism. The best way to create fascists is to attack and histrionically go after non-fascists and demand they conform to our way of thought. Just being left-wing and going after people out of disgust over their opinions, I've accidentally alienated more people and created more fascists than any of these limp-wrist right-wing conservatives could ever hope to create. I only realized it years later. Radicalism begets radicalism.

mcintyre1994 1y ago

I wonder if the algorithm is affected by blocking the high profile account in these cases. Eg I blocked Musk ages ago because if you don’t then the algorithm just constantly pushes his ‘content’ at you. So does the algorithm still prioritise things he’s interacted with for me, or does it only do that for people who haven’t blocked him? I definitely get stuff recommended that I expect he might interact with, but I don’t know if that’s actually specifically why it’s being pushed at me.

numpad0 1y ago
They've massively raised various penalization thresholds too, so that organically valued content cannot gain popularity. Unless you've blocked everything he sees, you're still affected.

jadbox 1y ago

Just my personal antidotal experience, my reach on X in the last six months has tanked more than 10-100x and my usage hasn't really changed. At this point, I feel my reach has basically dropped to near zero unless some "big name influencer" boosts it with a comment.

neilv 1y ago

> When an account with 219 million followers interacts with a smaller one — not by blocking or arguing, but simply by muting — the consequences are immediate. The smaller account’s visibility drops from 150,000 views to 20,000 overnight. Is this true on Twitter/X? If so, what is the rationale?

numpad0 1y ago
Lots of people report those kinds of massive deboosting and visibility penalties, and constantly devising avoidance strategies. There are no trivially inferred rationale as with lots of things going on in the world, unless destruction of value were the goal.
Shekelphile 1y ago
There were more than a few cases at the time around acquisition where Musk publicly got into autistic manbaby slapfights with people on twitter and ended up banning them publicly. Presumably he is choosing to avoid doing this to mask what is happening to the victim and to avoid more bad press about it - it directly harms his thinly veiled persona as a free speech absolutist.

jhp123 1y ago

I wouldn't think you need any deep insight or analysis to understand that a media site privately held by a government official is propaganda

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

In this modern era we heave under the weight of decades of exponential growth. In some cases it’s actually “only” compound growth - but the result has been the same (and very ironic): ossification through stratification. There are behemoths living among us. There will soon be social media accounts with enough sway to manufacture truth. What needs to be learned is society is like a national park. Left to its own devices it will end up trashed - people leave garbage, move in and use it for whatever they like. So, we fund a service that keeps parks maintained. We understand the benefits of the National Park Service because they are visible and we are visual creatures. But for some reason we have a more laissez-faire attitude to unchecked accumulation and its downstream effects. It’s risky for power to be so concentrated. We’re forced to hope for benevolence and there’s no backup plan. What more can be done to show the orders of magnitude of difference between the most and least powerful?

hammock 1y ago

This is a good summary of psyops currently in use by all sides of US and foreign governments and private interests against the American people, and applies to all forms of media, not just Twitter.

-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago

Is there a curated and serious resource from any public body or private individual documenting specific cases of abuse by Twitter? Any links greatly appreciated.

hamilyon2 1y ago

MeowMeowBeenz or Nosedive, in real world

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Avlin67 1y ago

i think it is the same with reddit