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Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.

• simondotau 12d ago
  Yes, and? I can't bend reality to make it otherwise.
  • vrganj 12d ago
    XCancel can.
    • simondotau 12d ago
      "XCancel Taken Down Again" is the title of this thread.
      • vrganj 12d ago
        Indeed. But they've been doing good work and fighting is better than just giving in to apathy and losing by default.
• frumplestlatz 12d ago
  Given its extremely liberal content moderation policy, how is X a propaganda machine?
  • vrganj 12d ago
    Here's a pretty in-depth investigation into the workings of X as far-right propaganda machine: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464445 https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo... > right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning. > Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing. > The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan. > Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.
    • frumplestlatz 12d ago
      So journalists ran a study with extremely poor sampling, base rate, and classification methodology designed by left-wing researchers and activists groups (including groups explicitly opposed to X), found the conclusions they wanted to find, and spent the second half of their article decrying the lack of heavy-handed moderation that pre-Musk Twitter used to control speech. All we can actually derive from that article is that X’s new user recommendation system exposed a small number of near-default, low-feedback, synthetic accounts to more content that left-wing “misinformation” researchers classified as “right-wing”.
      • monocasa 12d ago
        Musk also uses plenty of heavy handed moderation; it's just almost all directed at the left. For instance: https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethinc-from-twitter-on-request-from-far-right-troll https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethinc-...
        • frumplestlatz 12d ago
          They were banned for literally advocating for political violence. The fact that they hadn’t been banned earlier is the only concerning fact here. The current top article on their website argues for punching their political opponents in the streets.
          • monocasa 12d ago
            And yet right wingers openly calling for the west to ethnically cleanse the non white races get reinstated. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-twitter-reinstates-neo-nazi-andrew-anglin-account-1234640390/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus... And simply criticizing Musk is enough to get a shadow ban https://futurism.com/twitter-shadow-ban-elon-musk https://futurism.com/twitter-shadow-ban-elon-musk
            • 12d ago
  • nickthegreek 12d ago
    algo is what can make or break a propaganda machine.
  • laimewhisps 12d ago
    X is extremely aggressive in banning anti-Zionists, both left and right wing. It has some of the most anti-free speech policies on the internet.
• Levitz 12d ago
  Damn it's almost as if this was a conversation we should have had around 2018 at the latest. Like evident bias in social networks was a real concern all along. What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter". I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this. Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.
  • mahboi 12d ago
    Yeah, most of the people are upset because they're Democrats politically on Twitter, and the old one catered to them.
    • simondotau 12d ago
      As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.
      • vrganj 11d ago
        That's not what the data says: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464445 https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...
        • simondotau 11d ago
          That's what some motivated cable news researchers decided to abuse statistics to say. To be generous, I would say the article makes a significantly stronger causal claim than the experiment supports. The best description is a good exploratory algorithm audit with weak statistical and causal inference. The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.
• hobo123 11d ago
  You mean like Zuck prevents me from seeing any Instagram content without login?
  • mitxela 11d ago
    If you find yourself either ignoring or logging in to view Instagram posts, then yes. But history is path dependent, and this problem mainly occurs on X.