/**
* These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are
* serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users.
* This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes
* that negatively impacts one group over others.
*/
... Metrics tracked in AB test. So even if it's not explicitly encoded in the algo (or implicitly through some of the features plugged in), they'll pick the winning cell as long as it doesn't hurt Elon's metrics (I'm just parroting the comment you quoted).
It doesn't have to be in the algorithm for the systems to be tweaked to please Elon vanity metrics.
[I've been running lots of ML AB tests over the years, some in organizations of similar size & complexity as Twitter]
That lines up with reporting from Casey Newton a few days ago where a handful of VIPs e.g. Musk, LeBron James, AOC were being used as weather vanes to understand what the algorithm was doing.
It definitely isn't just metrics. Any algorithm change that negatively affected Musk was clearly not going live.
> I suspect that there was another name there before
Who ? Musk is unique in being obsessed with being liked and relevant.
All of the other social CEOs including Porag and Jake have never really cared that much. And none of them participated in contributing content anything close to what Musk does.
Why is Musk obsessed with being liked? There was a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets which was provably false.
It is very much likely to be the CEO a company wanting to understand his companies product.
We can't comment on why, but there's no rational way to watch his behavior and assume he isn't obsessed with being liked. He constantly tweets about his own tweets performance, makes humiliating appearances on stages, and pretty much terrified that someone might do something 1/100000th as awful to him as he and his family have done to others.
> a hoax last month about the algorithm being tweaked to make everyone view Elon’s tweets
Didn't this just reveal that they're A/B testing on Musk's tweet performance? At the very least they're avoiding regressions, and I guess any incidental improvements to it won't be reversed, so isn't it fundamentally the same? Unless we're taking the word "everyone" literally, I guess.
I don’t remember the specifics but I think there was a case where they accidentally amplified his tweets too much and they did reverse that change. He tweeted about it but I think it was a couple months back so it would take a bit to find.
Yes tabloids, both known for making up stories and sensationalism, all sourced from the same single blog article, easily confirmable looking as false at the view count for Elon’s tweets, explained by engineers as exactly what we saw here (logging output not changing output) and I don’t believe you re: seeing his tweets despite blocking him. Nobody else had that happen.
Someone wants to measure their business after paying what was a reasonable figure when they offered it, but that became overpriced once the market changed.
Sounds like fairly rational behaviour.
HN isn’t a site for making unfounded personal attacks on others.
His offer included a meme number and was overvalued even in April '22 (by 54% !), claimed he was going to combat the spam bots, and then tried to back out, citing the same spam bots. The event was described as a "hostile takeover" at the time [0], a term which has stuck all the way through to most summaries of the event [1]
A hostile takeover has a specific meaning. It's simply a takeover attempt where a buyer approaches shareholders instead of the company's management, this is usually (if not always) because the latter fails. And it always comes with a premium and drama, precisely because it goes against the wishes of the management of a company. And the premium is also logical because presumably shareholders of a company "believe" in that company, and an outsider now wants to take it over. A good example [1] is when Inbev (massive multinational beer company) purchased Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser). It made the purchase of Twitter look downright cordial, but was probably outside of most of our bubbles.
Yea, to make people buy your company you need to offer a premium. He backed out saying he was lied to about the current level of fake accounts, which is also reasonable if that was the case.
It would have been reasonable if he had performed due diligence and came to that conclusion, but he explicitly chose to waive due diligence, and then tried to renege anyway.
As a person who occasionally uses Twitter, but has no interest in having an account, he has dramatically improved the experience. Before he took over it was made impossible to view replies from a user, users were spammed with popup login dialogues that could not be closed with a single click, and more. I expect Twitter probably drove more people away from the site with all this nonsense, than they coerced into registering.
I also think many of the changes to make Twitter more open, such as now open sourcing the recommendation algorithm, publishing view counts (which indirectly makes it clear when something or somebody has been shadow banned), and more are all big steps forward in creating a much better and open service for all. Really most of every change he's pursued since taking over Twitter, from my perspective at least, seems to have been big steps forward.
He accused Twitter of being politically biased to the left and suppressing tweets, so he bought it to "allow free speech", except in his mind free speech apparently equates to being able to promote right wing propaganda.
As a platform, sure it can be better, and it wasn't exactly under the best management before (although the Twitter file leak actually made the old management look better than everyone thought). But lets not pretend that Musk is in this for the platform - he wants control of information to boost Republican leaders because in his mind, he is the savior of human race, so the best leadership is that which allows him to do the things he wants to do.
I absolutely will criticize Elon for his behavior around the twitter buyout. He's handled layoff/firing decisions extremely poorly. He's alienated a large portion of the ad buyers. These are not unfounded attacks.
Elon does not need you going around personally trying to shut down other people's discussion. That's cult like behavior.
That is "measuring their business" only if one of the main goals for their business is for it to promote them; because this is exactly what they measure here.
It’s the CEO being able to write something and see where it ends up after going through the pipeline. It does not increase views. I can repeat this, other can repeat this, or you can look at the code.
If the “normal way” of doing things worked then Twitter wouldn’t have been in such a bad state when he took over in the first place. An unconventional approach brings more risk but can also end up being worth it.
Would I do things differently if it were up to me? Sure, but it isn’t, and I can at least appreciate that they are trying to move quickly & try different things. I’m reserving my judgement for whether or not this approach works in the long run.
> which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?
When you run an A/B test you randomly divide your users into groups, one (treatment) getting the new behavior and one (control) getting the current production behavior. So your question doesn't make much sense?
Depends on the question. If you want to answer a question like “does change X increase engagement?” then a straight A/B test works. But if you want to answer one like “does change X increase engagement while (favoring/not favoring) group 1 over group 2?”, then an A/B test plus measuring groups 1 and 2 will not work without a control group, because without controls you don’t know if any changes to engagement for your measured groups are significant. There is some threshold of change to the engagement for the measured groups which is too small to be significant, and you should ignore results that only measure that noise.
I think a lot of it is lies... I used to observe that tweeting anything remotely political went straight to trending timelines, so did tweets about crypto and NFTs...
I doubt that Twitter and most of these social platforms are driven by Ai... Maintaining and changing complex algos could not be done on a rapid pace like what occurs now... I think Twitter has moderators, and scripts that control everything, and it can be more easily adjusted to tweak what is visible on the platform based on whatever agenda they want to represent (politics, revenue, PR/damage control).
Twitter frequently bends the rules to serve celebrities, politics, and sponsors and for that they need to be able to quickly adjust scripts. True Ai is meant to function on it's own with minimal intervention, and therein a simple change to a massive logic scheme would completely FUBAR everything.
I think there are rooms full of people that filter and either promote or suppress posts on Twitter every day, namely suppressing any tweets critical of the platform and it's owner... I've noticed that at night time hours, moderation of Tweets is less restrictive as a cue to what goes on there.
There are certain topics that are not moderated as heavily as others (3d Design and other non-controversial topics), and some topics (for example music and porn) that are restricted heavily visibility-wise because they force people to run ads to rank in trending (because it generates a lot of opportunistic money for Twitter as a platform).
Users that are critical of the platform and Elon and his allies (for example) can easily be neutered by moderators and put on shadow ban for any period of time in order to preserve the illusion of calm concerning Twitter operations. Complaints about Twitter only become visible when the majority of the audience tweets about problems (as that can't be moderated out without exposing moderation).
It's pretty much all smoke and mirrors there in order to maintain order in my opinion, and it's pretty much futile and torturous to people who just want to create and seize opportunity for their business without spending tons of money on platform marketing...
There is absolutely no reason to believe there was another Single user getting this treatment before. The Elon-case was just copy & pasted as an ego-stroking hack.
No. Not a chance. Elon’s claims of mismanagement at Twitter have merit, though not nearly as much as he think, but the one thing that’s undeniable is that the previous “owner” (well, the CEO), is an adult that didn’t care about this shit.
Why, exactly, should the CEO of Twitter care about their own tweets getting maximum attention? If anything, this takes engineering effort away from customers because special implementations like "is_elon" have to be added.
So many unnecessarily cynical takes here. Let's say you were in charge of a large legacy system that some segment of customers complain about it not working for them as well as other segments. How would you know whether their complaints are valid unless you measured it? You have to know first. So measure it.
Yeah, but then what do you do after you measure it? Nothing? No, you make decisions differently so as not to offend whoever is part of the criteria. For example, can we agree that we don't want an "author_is_flat_earther" flag? Because who gives a shit if Twitter makes a change to their recommendation engine that negatively affects flag earthers? Just because something is only used for A/B testing doesn't make it completely inert.
You can dismiss the complaint without measurement if you are confident in two things:
1. Your system does nothing to actually segment this specific group by their identity.
2. You are confident that the systems you have set up to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior are accurate.
If both of those are true, you know that even if the group is being disproportionately negatively impacted by some form of recommendation/moderation, that it is only because that group disproportionately participates in behavior that is bad for the platform. That isn't a problem. It would actually be worse for the platform overall if you did anything to appease that group.
> ...it is only because that group disproportionately participates in behavior that is bad for the platform. That isn't a problem.
That is exactly what Twitter's stance has been all along (in the pre-Elon era) and it IS a problem for the product because people being silenced due to their own bad behavior (example: misgendering transgender people) feel an injustice is being done. The rule-makers get to set the range of acceptable discourse on Twitter and those to the right of center have felt unfairly disadvantaged by the way it was done in the past.
Over time this has eroded trust in the product. Just because people aren't being labeled and ranked based on whether they are red team or blue team, the people deciding what "good" and "bad" behavior looks like on the platform have the power to disproportionately impact these groups.
Data isn't going to tell Twitter whether to allow or disallow misgendering people. You either think that is bad behavior that shouldn't be allowed or you don't. Disallowing it is not disadvantaging Republicans. It is stopping behavior Twitter has deemed is bad for the platform. As I said in point 2 above, either Twitter is confident in those decisions or not. Data is worthless when it comes to a moral decision like that.
And if we accept hat Twitter believes (or more accurately did believe) that misgendering people is wrong, who cares whether people who want to do it feel an injustice is being done? Would anyone say that deleting spam is an injustice to spammers? You break the rules and you get punished.
> Data isn't going to tell Twitter whether to allow or disallow misgendering people. You either think that is bad behavior that shouldn't be allowed or you don't. Disallowing it is not disadvantaging Republicans.
If one of the defining characteristics of a political/religious/cultural group is having a particular ethical view, then enforcing a contrary ethical view against them is disadvantaging them and discriminating against them. Now, it may in some cases be morally and/or legally permissible, or even justifiable, discrimination, but it still is discrimination, and it is still disadvantaging them.
> Would anyone say that deleting spam is an injustice to spammers? You break the rules and you get punished.
Worldwide, many jurisdictions have laws against discrimination on the basis of religion; although it is less common, some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief. A law prohibiting discrimination on some ground, is evidence that some people believe discrimination on that ground to be immoral. By contrast, I've never heard anyone suggest that spammers should constitute a "protected class", and I'm not aware of any jurisdiction which treats them as one.
Some people believe that there is nothing morally wrong with discrimination on the basis of religion and/or politics. Other people think there is something morally wrong with it, but if there is a conflict between the right to be free from religious and/or political discrimination, and the rights of LGBT people, the rights of the latter morally ought to take priority. Spam is irrelevant to that ethical debate.
>If one of the defining characteristics of a political/religious/cultural group is having a particular ethical view, then enforcing a contrary ethical view against them is disadvantaging them and discriminating against them.
I don't think misgendering people is a "defining characteristic" of Republicans and if that is, the Republican Party is in a pretty sad state considering all the bigger problems in the world. And if that qualifies as a "defining characteristic", there are plenty of other counter examples of society accepting discrimination as you define it. Banning polygamy would be discriminatory against Mormons is one. You could even argue that a full abortion ban is discriminatory against Jewish people.
>some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief.
Notably not in the US where Twitter is based and were most of these complaints originate.
> I don't think misgendering people is a "defining characteristic" of Republicans and if that is, the Republican Party is in a pretty sad state considering all the bigger problems in the world.
Some religious conservatives are convinced that referring to a transgender person by their preferred pronoun is a sin, even a serious one, for which they will be judged by God. Even religious conservatives who don't personally subscribe to that viewpoint, see it as one they are morally obliged to respect and defend. [0] While that doesn't describe all Republicans, obviously there is a significant overlap between Republicans and religious conservatives. And for a devout religious person, their religious beliefs are one of their defining characteristics–they are a huge part of their life, even their very identity, who they understand themselves to be.
Even those conservatives who think it is okay to use a person's preferred pronouns, will adopt a much more restricted stance on the topic than many trans activists. Many will insist on it must be voluntary rather than mandatory, and defend the freedom of conscience of those who take a more conservative stance than they do – which is an expression of both religious and political beliefs about respect for individual freedom and conscience.
Some conservatives are willing to use a friend/colleague/acquaintance's preferred pronouns when interacting with them, but will refuse to do the same for a criminal in the news. Look at Wikipedia to see people who vehemently insist that you must use the preferred pronouns of a dead school shooter or executed murderer – and even if the family of the victims publicly objected to it, that wouldn't change their mind.
> Banning polygamy would be discriminatory against Mormons is one. You could even argue that a full abortion ban is discriminatory against Jewish people.
Prohibitions on discrimination are never absolute, they always permit exceptions – so the existence of exceptions is not an argument against the existence of the prohibition. And whatever the merits of those specific examples, they are actions, not speech. Society traditionally gives religious minorities far greater latitude with respect to their beliefs about what they can and can't say, than their beliefs about actions which aren't predominantly expressive in character. Jehovah's Witnesses who believe it is a sin to salute flags or recite pledges of allegiance, Quakers who believe it is a sin to swear oaths, etc.
> >some jurisdictions also have laws against discrimination on the basis of political belief.
> Notably not in the US where Twitter is based and were most of these complaints originate.
While the US currently lacks federal laws banning political discrimination, state and local laws sometimes do ban it, see [1]. Some of those laws are specific to certain contexts (e.g. housing or employment), and so may not be applicable to a social media platform such as Twitter. However, given increasing concern among conservatives about political discrimination, it seems rather likely that we'll see more state laws enacted on that topic in the future.
> Some religious conservatives are convinced that referring to a transgender person by their preferred pronoun is a sin, even a serious one, for which they will be judged by God.
I don't expect their empathy. I expect them to experience consequences for their actions. The consequences can stop when the actions stop and aren't expected to be repeated. I expect some subset of them to have an understanding of cause and effect, and thus learn. (If the lesson they learn is "change actions" rather than "change mindset producing actions", that'll do.) I expect the rest to complain about experiencing consequences for their actions.
> I don't expect their empathy. I expect them to experience consequences for their actions. The consequences can stop when the actions stop and aren't expected to be repeated.
Or, they can turn around and try to impose negative consequences on the people who are trying to impose negative consequences on them. Which, one might argue, is exactly what is happening in several state legislatures in the US right now. And then the fight goes on until one side wins, or there is some sort of "peace deal".
That's what happens with irreconcilable values differences, yes.
But I wouldn't frame it as cause-and-effect like that: one side doesn't attack the other as a response to experiencing consequences; they attack the other pervasively at every opportunity, and sometimes experience consequences for doing so.
If one side believes they are completely innocent and the other side are just plain evil – and the other side believes the same things right back – isn't that how civil wars start?
We have a democracy precisely to avoid such things. I'd prefer the strategy of "decide to actually start winning at every opportunity"; it would be a novel change in strategy.
Let's stop treating this as "maybe there's a way to convince people", understand that there is no way to convince some people, and instead just win. Win, and keep winning, and use those wins to eliminate things like voter suppression and gerrymandering, and then never lose again.
Try as hard as you might, there's no guarantee you can win. What happens to "win, and keep winning... and then never lose again", if you never "win" the first time? The US political system is rigged (arguably by design) to favour conservatives. To successfully undo that rigging requires not just winning narrowly, it requires winning decisively. But how do you win decisively when the system is rigged against you? It might be about to get even more rigged–if the upcoming SCOTUS decision in Moore v Harper embraces the "independent state legislature theory", all efforts to prevent gerrymandering by state legislatures would be dead in the water. So, what if you don't win, what if you lose–what then do you do?
And even if your wildest dreams come true–if you win too big, the other side may turn around and say "democracy isn't working for us any more". If it gets to the point that a significant minority of the population (say 20-40%) no longer believes that democracy is in their best interests, democracy's days are numbered. Especially if that significant minority has a great deal of wealth, influence and power. It could end in the peaceful negotiation of a "national divorce"–and there are many worst ways it could end than that.
Am I misunderstanding? Are you suggesting that penalising those who misgender transgender people is unfairly disadvantaging people whose political views are right of centre?
It's not about what I personally believe or think is unfair. It's about what Republicans (broadly speaking) believe. There is massive resentment from people on the right who think the Twitter rules unfairly elevated some political opinions as good/correct/acceptable while treating others as unacceptable.
The handling of trans issues is just one example to illustrate the problem here. People on the left think trans rights are human rights while people on the right think a lot of trans issues should be open for discussion, legislation, persecution, etc. I think if we're being intellectually honest most would acknowledge that as a country we are far from consensus on many of the details here (bathrooms, girls sports, etc), and yet Twitter's rules and enforcement actions behaved as if the leftist view of transgender people is the only valid and permissible view.
The handling of January 6 and the banning of Trump is another example.
These things are Rorschach tests; people apply their biases and reach very different conclusions about what should be done. I don't claim to know the solution, I'm just trying to sketch out the problem with the way things were creating a climate where a big segment of the US felt unwelcome and resentful toward the platform.
This presents a problem for the platform, since you can't afford to alienate large double digit percents of the population if your mandate from shareholders is to grow mDAU by any means necessary. In that context, having some metrics tracking in place to measure the impact of algorithm changes on democrats and republicans to see whether impact is disproportionate is a completely rational thing to do.
While I can understand there may be debate around various trans issues purposefully calling someone something when they’ve politely asked you to call them something else isn’t up for much debate. Seems like common courtesy/politeness.
I see your point about losing users potentially but I would argue that Twitter’s intense focus on the US (as shown by the democrat/republican metrics) and trying to placate everyone is actually a negative for their business. There’s billions of other internet users outside the US. Shifting focus to serve them instead of focussing intensely on trying to please both sides in the US (and failing) would probably deliver better value for their shareholders.
> purposefully calling someone something when they’ve politely asked you to call them something else isn’t up for much debate. Seems like common courtesy/politeness.
It can be if the thing they're asking for is perceived to be untrue and the person being asked is a big stickler for that sort of thing. If you'll excuse me using metaphors on this sensitive topic: if someone wants to be referred to as "His Majesty" but is not actually the king then while many nice people will indulge him[1], some who care a great deal about the "correct" usage of noble titles won't.
But what if you flip the coin? What if the person being asked really, really thinks that the other person is a pissface, and is a big stickler for calling people he perceives to be pissfaces as such? Surely we can all agree that allowing them to follow their ideas will lead to bad discourse.
And it doesn't even have to be such a crass example. What if a person is legally called Robert, but he's gone by Bob his whole life - is the stickler right if they insist on calling them by their legally given name?
This is where user options should allow for that. If being called a different gender is so bad just block the people that do that. The problem is you might need that word in general discourse as well. So you can't just create a rule that blocks everyone who says "He" just like you can block the n-word. The problem is with the person assuming every single person in the general public should treat them as a friend and getting offended when a label that is applied to half of the population (neither as a positive or negative, merely as a descriptor) is somehow that bad of a thing.
> Surely we can all agree that allowing them to follow their ideas will lead to bad discourse.
I actually think that if someone genuinely thinks someone else is a pissface then it's their right to call the other person that. I also think that excluding such a person from your conversations may be sensible. This applies to pronouns too.
>It's not about what I personally believe or think is unfair. It's about what Republicans (broadly speaking) believe.
No, it is about what Twitter believes. That was what I was referring to with point 2 in my original comment. Not every customer complaint is valid. It is ok to hear a complaint and dismiss it without further investigation. Twitter doesn't have some obligation to get all of society to think its rules are fair.
It is fine for a company to tell some potential customers to "fuck off" as long as that company isn't discriminating against a protected class. Twitter isn't discriminating against a protected class here.
If Twitter thinks misgendering people is wrong, it is impossible to come to an agreement with a group that think properly gendering people is wrong without Twitter compromising its own morals. Twitter is allowed to stick to its own morals and tell the people who disagree to "fuck off".
> There is massive resentment from people on the right who think the Twitter rules unfairly elevated some political opinions as good/correct/acceptable while treating others as unacceptable.
Would it surprise you to find out that this resentment is in fact, conveniently manufactured, politically useful outrage? Because it's simply not true on its face, and the only thing we need to know to understand this is to see that it took Trump launching a coup to be banned on the platform. He violated the TOS every day, and he was allowed to spread his message to his millions of followers by Twitter. You want to talk about unfairly elevating political opinions? Trump used the platform to violate citizens' first amendment rights, and we had to take him to court to get those rights back. Twitter didn't do shit to protect us from him.
But it's not just Trump. It's right wing political opinions writ large. Far and away from sinking right wing conservative voices, Twitter research found they actually amplify right wing voices in every one of their top 6 countries except Germany [1]. Yes, that includes the US.
Is your mind blown? Have you heard of this once? I bet all you've heard from Musk and right wing politicians is that Twitter is going hard on conservatives and deplatforming them. Blocking their messages. Being unfair to conservatives and right wing opinions.
Yet what has actually happened? Twitter was actually deferential to conservative voices! It boosted conservatives and right wing voices at the expense of liberals. How did this happen? This is conservative messaging 101: complain about bias loudly enough and the other side will go so far out of their way to seem unbiased, they will be biased in the other direction. Conservatives managed to complain so loud about Twitter being biased against them that you not only believe it, but reality is actually completely the opposite.
Folks like Jordan Peterson would like you to think so, yes.
Of course, the man is essentially a walking “old man yells at clouds” meme at this point, so I’m not sure you should take anything he says with any merit.
If engagement on the tweets of that user goes down after a change has been implemented, you can roll back the change to prevent that user from being negatively impacted.
What if engagements around that user naturally declined, perhaps due to that user going off the deep end. Wouldn’t this just serve to bias the algorithm toward propping up the exposure of that user? Do they even care about the control so long as that user’s engagement is up and to the right?
Come on think this through. It’s trivial to tell the difference between a gradual and natural decline and a drastic decline immediately after rolling out a change. Especially when the change is rolled out region by region and only exists in regions running the update. You have to be able to measure the effect of changes and the most popular accounts are the obvious low hanging fruit for doing that.
I expect they're tracking the red team/blue team metrics because of the political shitstorm that's been the GOP's assertions they're being silenced by The Algorithm.
The fallacy of false equivalence systematized in code.
Now one side can spew as much disinfo and incitement to violence as it likes, and any algorithm change that prevents this shit from getting amplified will be rejected as bias.
This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. It was reported years ago that Twitter was unable to cut down on hate speech because the automated systems they developed triggered too many [debatably false] positives on Republican politicians and that was bad for the company's reputation. If Twitter wanted to prevent future code changes from impacting that approach, there needed to be something like this in the code or tests.
I don't know what specific documents you think did that, but "comprehensively" is absolutely an awful way to describe the Twitter Files. They were anything but "comprehensive". In actuality, they were an excellent example of how easy it is to lie using partial truths. For example, highlighting all the times Twitter took moderation recommendations from a Democratic campaign looks a lot worse if you hide any time they took moderation from Republican campaigns. A simple look at the specific journalists that were given access to Twitter documents and the strings attached to that access reveals that the Twitter Files were not about transparency. They were an ideological play and nothing more. If Musk wanted true transparency, he would have given wider access to more documents or just released them all like Jack Dorsey requested.
Could you please point out the list of moderation recommendations from Republican campaigns that were actually accepted and carried out? The only ones that were revealed so far were of the following types:
1. requests to un-ban or un-suspend right-wing personas
2. removal of explicit death threats.
3. Anything against the vaccine - even actual, scientific data.
From the twitter files, the Twitter team that was wholly left-leaning spent significant time and debate looking for the mildest of excuses to ban right-wing politicians, building black lists for them and even gloating happily as they managed to kick them off. Not much doubt about that - actually no one has even denied that. There were several hearings also in the house judiciary where they even confirmed the same.
(Interestingly, there was pressure applied on Matt Taibbi to either "shut up" or relinquish all his sources to law enforcement. Also, as a form of indirect pressure to rattle him, US tax agents visited his house the VERY DAY he would testify before US Congress stating that his tax returns had been rejected due to identity theft concerns - despite him having the electronic receipt which showed it being accepted.)
>Could you please point out the list of moderation recommendations from Republican campaigns that were actually accepted and carried out?
That is exactly my point. I can't because none were released. That is not a reason to assume they don't exist. You are assuming full transparency in a situation with only partial transparency.
WHEN THE WHITE House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.
That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases
> there is also no reason to beleive they do exist.
Proof of reason to believe they do exist.
Furthermore, the office of the president, the FBI, the Government making a request to limit the free speech of a citizen is entirely different from Joe Blow in the street making a request.
Twitter admits bias in algorithm for rightwing politicians and news outlets[1]
The research found that in six out of seven countries, apart from Germany, tweets from rightwing politicians received more amplification from the algorithm than those from the left; right-leaning news organisations were more amplified than those on the left; and generally politicians’ tweets were more amplified by an algorithmic timeline than by the chronological timeline.
According to a 27-page research document [2], Twitter found a “statistically significant difference favouring the political right wing” in all the countries except Germany.
Twitter admits it was boosting right wing accounts over left wing accounts. It treated right wing twitter users who violated its own terms of service better than regular users because of their position as conservative leaders. Trump himself was boosted and promoted while he violated Twitter TOS. It took him using Twitter to wage a coup against the US government for them to ban him. So yeah, there's more than a little reason to believe that there's evidence at Twitter of them boosting right wing accounts.
And PS: Notice that this research by Twitter is never mentioned by Musk or in the Twitter files. They're trying very hard to memory hole this report, and it seems like it's worked on you.
But that was published while the pro-Democrat establishment goons were in charge of Twitter, so of course they would say that because they wanted you to beleive they weren't favouring the left. It's hardly a reiable source. Same applies to Musk-era of course.
In the end, we accept the things we agree with, and discredit the ones we prefer not to believe. Human nature.
As I said, we don't need to know anything internal about Twitter to know for a fact that they bent over backwards to elevate extremist right wing voices. Because they elevated the most important extremist voice for 4 years as he violated the terms of use for their platform. In effect, we all had one TOS, and there was a different, more permissive TOS for the leader of the US MAGA-right wing movement, the most extreme version of right wing politics in America. That's blatant, confirmed, irrefutable, systematic bias and special treatment for conservatives on Twitter, pre Musk.
In case you want to discount the Twitter report as a false flag, here's a report from NYU that independently confirmed Twitter is biased toward conservatives. It also found the same for Facebook: https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/bias-report-release-page
You really can't just blanket claim that all research from a university is politically biased, even if you feel American universities in general are biased. Come on now, we're here for discourse that's a little more nuanced than that I hope.
Since all you're bringing to the discussion at this point is a comic, I think that's all there is to say.
I don't see an unbiased way to tell which "side" releases more disinformation and incitement to violence. Even deciding what counts as disinformation is hard (e.g. does it have to be literally false or just cause false beliefs in the reader?).
One way to tell would be to look at which side is incited to violence more often.
It turns out, according to the FBI (which is a conservative organization historically and exclusively run by conservatives), right wing extremism and violence is in fact the biggest domestic terror threat in the US, and it's currently growing [1]. FBI Director Wray gave this testimony after a right wing domestic terror attack was carried out that aimed to topple the US government. Not much has changed since then [2]. Since the former President's indictment the other day, the right-wing violent rhetoric has also ratcheted up a notch, so we can expect right-wing violence to follow.
Notably, we can confidently say this doesn't happen on the left, as when Hillary lost they did not launch an assault against the Capitol as the right did. Instead, they knit pink hats and had a march.
(PS before anyone whattabouts the George Floyd protests, the FBI doesn't see them the same way [3])
They don't have to, because he effectively can't be muted. People tweet quote him with an image, and it's not blocked even though I have him blocked as an account. This behavior is pervasive enough that you can still see his tweets all the time.
I imagine it's the largest metric in a mission control style room
it starts dropping, klaxons start blaring, the room drops to red only lighting, engineers on the floor start pulling out their hair knowing the shitstorm that's coming
Per original source, The code that was released today doesn't show the parts that actually alter the scores of Elon and other users. The part of the code referenced below just tracks Elon stats (from what I know). Employees removed most PII before the code was released.
Update: Elon was asked about these in a Twitter Space, he says it's not appropriate and will be removed from the codebase.
Additionally, from another Twitter engineer, the Democrat/Republican flags are apparently 10 years old and not important and do not have high feature importance.
Elons reply “I only learned about it now!”. What a crock of shit. We literally went through reporting a few months back where he was clearly instructing the team to make sure his tweets always come up, for everyone.
Yeah but presumably he didn't think the devs would tag a specific metric for "elon", which would later be open-sourced. It's one of those things that makes more sense in retrospect...
As in: "My tweets are very important, if they don't show up on top, it means the algorithm can't recognize what is important, it needs to be fixed". And the team, who probably didn't see in which way Elon Musk's tweets could be that important besides the fact that he wrote them, they just decided to give Elon Musk's tweets a boost.
The most hilarious things to me was when I was reading some (unrelated to this drama tweet) posted in an article and the top recommendation was Musk's tweet that he doesn't artificially promote his tweets.
From what I understand of upthread, it doesn't "give elon musk's tweets a boost", rather any change which downgrades musk's visibility is considered a regression.
Obviously the end result is similarly that musk's visibility can never decrease, but it's a more technical (and to the letter) compliance with the specifications.
If I remember correctly, he noticed that his account with 100,000,000 plus followers was only getting 40,000 or so views. This lead to a Twitter engineer saying maybe his content wasn't interesting enough to get views and getting fired. And later on Musk said that they found a bug in the fanout system because his account was so big it basically broke things and they fixed it.
I remember everyone agreeing with the Twitter engineer who said maybe his content wasn't interesting enough, while to me that seemed odd. If people follow an account and they tweet and they're online they should have a high chance of seeing that tweet. That's the entire point of following someone. If someone I've followed tweets something I would like to see it.
The fanout bug was in weighting how blocks affect visibility and fanout.
Apparently it was an absolute and not a relative thing, so the huge amount of blocks musk has affected their visibility.
You don't, at least for me, I have 5700 followers and most posts (with art) only see 200-500 impressions, whereas a year ago I was getting 3000 on average. The Following tab is clearly (at least for me) not in timeline order, so most of my followers never even know I posted anything. Since I post art most of my followers are artists, so you would think they would see them. Impressions (which are Twitter putting tweets in a timeline so that people scroll by them) are not under the control of the poster. Likes per impression for me are up, so interaction is higher which is supposed to increase how often tweets are shown, but only timely retweets seem to help any.
I am trying to figure out how the algorithm decides on what to show in the Following tab, but the code is way too big to analyze without being able to run it and look at logging/metrics/stats.
> We literally went through reporting a few months back where he was clearly instructing the team to make sure his tweets always come up, for everyone.
Feel free to give me a source for that, but I'm pretty sure that's not true.
It was widely reported in the days following the Super Bowl that he personally ordered his Tweets be boosted after a Tweet by Biden got more engagement than his similar Tweet [0].
As far as I can tell, he did not instruct Twitter employees to make his Tweets appear to all users, but he did want them to make his posts appear in timelines significantly more often. This lead to reports of users suddenly getting their timelines flooded with lots of his Tweets.
It seems like there was a rush within Twitter to raise Musk’s engagement numbers by altering the recommendation algorithm to specifically boost posts from his accounts. The special boost factor was later reduced, but allegedly still exists.
Wrong. Elon noticed his tweets had low engagement relative to his follower count compared to other accounts.
After some digging in the code base it turned out that there was a de-boosting factor based on the absolute numbers of blocks your account had, which affected popular and controversial accounts (like Elon’s) unfairly.
This investigation was initiated by Musk but it resulted in a great improvement in the algorithm with no special treatment for his account.
Well that's what the claim was. I never bought it, to me it sounded very much like the "Dear Leader Kim observed during the factory tour that one of the machines was miscalibrated and that productivity could be increased tenfold". Remember that he'd just fired an engineer on the spot for suggesting there wasn't a technical reason behind his lower engagement, and that the unspoken reason was he's frankly just a bit annoying and his epic meming CEO shtick was wearing thin. So I think when he raises the issue again, they just implement `author_is_elon` and they get to tell him that actually he is good at posting after all and there was just a weird technical issue they have now fixed.
Elon's happy, the engineers he turned to kept jobs and any time I find myself in the "For You" tab I see Elon's memes and his @catturd2 RTs.
> By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
> Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told.
It seems indisputable that Musk’s account gets special treatment, even if some of the changes may also boost other controversial users.
You did not reference any sources, while the article claims sources inside Twitter gave them this information.
Anonymous Twitter sources may have _low_ credibility, but Elon musk has _exactly zero_ credibility at this point. He has a significant and proven track record of making false and misleading statements, even ignoring the many many more difficult to prove allegations.
In my personal experience, software engineers, when you ask them about technical matters like "does the code do X" or "is there a condition for Y" are generally pretty honest. Programming is a task that requires being able to have structured and literal reasoning, and asking engineers about purely technical details usually triggers that response, even if you can imagine a social motive for lying.
Disagree, Elon has high credibility IMO, certainly higher than an anonymous source with incentives to slander. Not saying he is perfect but given the scrutiny he is under and how much he is “in the arena” pushing the envelope.
Elon is furthermore a software engineer (he wrote ALOT of code at zip2 & paypal) so your argument falls flat in that regard.
Credibility from what exactly? Having last year's most expensive mid-life crisis? He once had some credibility, no one will deny that. Respect is earned and lost.
I think him buying twitter was great. He is lightyears better than previous owners & management. He is also running two other companies doing extraordinary things in the world.
Of all the people you can hate on in the world, hating on Elon is to me very odd. Tall poppy syndrome I guess...
He tried to fire a disabled employee via a public tweet without speaking to them privately first, and then had to retract it. This is McDonalds McManager behavior, not CEO behavior.
Musk did not write a lot of code at PayPal, that's factually incorrect. And he was ousted and replaced at PayPal because he was trying to make technical decisions that would've killed the company.
Note that some of the "false" statements later turn out to be true. E.g. holding child a last heartbeat happens (ex-wife held him for death rattle, elon for last heartbeat)
While it was thrilling for a moment to imagine myself as a disgruntled former Twitter staff member, that is not the case and I have not been employed there.
My statement above was to read ’we’ as in as the tech community not ‘we’ Twitter staff; others have quoted some of the sources on this thread, but it was definitively reported by a few different outlets at the time.
I think the decade old comment related to a different part of the code regarding the number of followers you have in relation to the number of accounts you follow. (Everybody on the call wants to remove this: I wonder why they haven't yet.)
Chesterton's Fence. In a sufficiently large system, you should be hesitant to remove things unless you're sure you know why it was added, and all the things that have come to depend on it since.
I've definitely been hesitant to remove things I was pretty confident weren't used anymore, just because I didn't want to deal with the repercussions if I was wrong.
I didn’t know there was a name for this. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve definitely been bitten by this. You always have to weigh the chance you break something against the upside. If you’re actually fixing a bug, fine. But just refactoring to make something cleaner? Or deleting because it seems like it’s not doing anything, even after doing some research? Think again.
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.
But on the topic of Democrats vs. Republican vs. independent; a big factor may be that "Democrat" and "Republican" are much more cohesive groups and therefore much easier to define. No one can honestly define "independent" except in a kind of "none of the above" sense, since they can range anywhere from extreme right, to the center, to the extreme left.
You might want to ask that of, say, astronomers, paleontologists, or even simply journalists.
Observing and measuring leads to understanding. As others here have noted, sometimes you want to measure to ensure that you're not inadvertently affecting an outcome or phenomenon.
> You might want to ask that of, say, astronomers, paleontologists, or even simply journalists.
You compare scientists with businesses. One of them's job and passion is to collect knowledge for the sake of knowledge. For the other one it would be cost without gain and eliminated if they didn't do anything with it!
No idea what journalists are doing in that list, what do they measure? If they want something measured they'd ask or look at other's services. Unless you mean the business that the journalists work for, but hen it's just that, a business.
I gave examples based on well-understood instances for which the reader is presumed to have the capacity to draw inferences to business-related concepts.
Businesses also rely on astronomy and geology, in instances. The former is used for navigation (though far less than in the past, I'll grant), and there are certain extractive sectors with interests in geology. Risk-management as well (insurance and catastrophic risk, whether from landslides, earthquakes, volcanos, tsunami, or other phenomena).
You'll also find businesses keeping tabs on weather, climate, competition (competitive intelligence), demographic data, politics, legal cases, laws, social and cultural movements, etc., etc., etc., which in many cases they have comparatively little capacity to change directly.
You're also jumping late into a thread which has already given numerous other rationales for why such activities might be undertaken.
Sometimes approaching a discussion from the PoV of seeing what you can learn from it rather than automatically adopting a presumptive stance of opposition or disagreement affords benefits. I recommend it strongly.
Depends what the metrics are used for. It doesn't make sense to apply artificial boosts to metrics that are only used for internal accounting. Well, maybe if you have an egotist CEO, but that wouldn't explain the rest of the boosts. We have to assume this code has some sort of effect somewhere.
This is what it means to let another country own your social media. Their ideas and memes unconsciously get preferential treatment. This is maybe not a good thing, but it is what it is.
It’s omission. They built for Americans because they were Americans. No one building this said “let’s ignore Canadian politics” or any other country, they just didn’t think about them at all, because like most Americans they don’t really care about the insidious Québécois plots to annex Prince Edward Island or whatever actual issues are happening in Canada.
The freedom convoy and it's repression with suspension of constitutional rights (because that's a thing over there?) and bank accounts arbitrarily frozen did get a little bit of attention in the American medias.
> the insidious Québécois plots to annex Prince Edward Island
I know it's a joke, but the people of Prince Edward Island would most likely welcome it. Economically that would be a huge boost. Not sure Québec would enjoy it however.
> The freedom convoy and it's repression with suspension of constitutional rights
This was needed because the convoy of morons was seriously damaging people's quality of life and the local police did not do their job. The police in other towns DID do their job and blocked the trucks. You should be mad at the cops who just sat by and watched the convoy of morons roll in with their thumbs up their butt.
Indeed their acts of terrorism were not reported by international media.
For example, during the occupation of residential areas of the capital they created deafening noise around the clock that was measured indoors (windows closed) at levels causing permanent hearing damage after minutes of exposure, with police doing nothing to stop them.
People can always use their countries' social media (and I assume many do!).
But it's indeed an interesting fact that people seem to specifically seek American tech and social media. And honestly, there's no shortages of foreign nationals commenting on American politics (and it's a good thing, it's their right thanks to the first amendment!).
The vast vast vast vast majority of people use “American” social network because they are the social networks that exist. The US is undeniably the main exporter of SaaS products. See: the incumbents freaking out that China is getting a turn in the front seat. I’ve never once heard of anyone seeking ‘American tech’, except for some punchline in an anti-Soviet joke or movie.
Foreign nationals can comment about American politics because the US doesn’t have jurisdiction over their speech, notwithstanding the back and forth over whether social media companies are liable for disseminating such content in the first place.
A material part of why the USA is seen as The Country in Western culture, and a noted big player in other cultures, is because of the power it projects via the media. That includes both Hollywood exports, and social media.
American social media companies have the benefit of a large homogenous deeply interconnected culture with a vast ad buying community. Simply put, a U.S. social media platform can get more revenue with less effort than a European counterpart (because they have to go country by country, language community by language community), and will generally outcompete those EU counterparts, with social network reinforcement effects doing the rest. This holds up for most ad-supported online services, which together with a much stronger private investment sector is the reason American platforms absolutely dominate Europe. The EU has a stronger government subsidy system for software but that system does not reward or expect market success, which is why it delivers very little value.
> I’ve never once heard of anyone seeking ‘American tech’
One reason people have a distorted idea of what physical products the US produces, so I've read, is that most of them are products for industrial use, in factories and so on.
You look at consumer products that are made in..., because that's where the finishing touches are put on. That's not representative of the global economy though.
> I’ve never once heard of anyone seeking ‘American tech’, except for some punchline in an anti-Soviet joke or movie.
Really? Why is everyone using MacBooks and iPhones? Actually most Soviet computers were copies of western designs. [0]
> is because of the power it projects via the media. That includes both Hollywood exports, and social media.
The thing is, is takes to to project, someone has to export a product and someone else has to import it. Since people seek it and want to consume it it's easy to export.
Before I deliberately locked myself out of it (well before Musk), I asked for my data.
They classify me as:
* speaks Indonesian
Interested in:
* Beer
* Cricket
* DJs
* Dance
* Enterprise software
* Horror
* NFL football
* South America
And aged either between 13-54 or (and?) over 65
Other than the age (I'm neither under 13 nor between 55-64), everything I've listed is incorrect.
On that basis, they'd probably call me a Republican.
Carries a different meaning when you're British, that name does.
What a strange age classification — no idea about what your age actually is, just that it definitely isn't 55-64. I assume it would never conclude you are under 13 for legal reasons.
But ever since Musk took over the amount of US political content has significantly increased in particular from the right despite me not living in the US.
It's hard to tell whether previously political content was weighted less and Musk has removed those controls or whether they are now weighted higher.
Some of the power users Musk reportedly had boosted are specifically right wing political posters, like catturd2. But then he's also boosted some high profile left leaning politicians, so it's not exclusive. It does mean you're more likely to see right wing American political content either way, which has to be annoying for people outside of the US.
I believe their point is that, because the US is generally regarded as 'to the right of' many countries in Europe, for example, a slight rightwing bias looks to us (I'm in the UK) like an extreme rightwing bias. Heck, even a completely neutral stance, as far as the US is concerned, will look like it veers to the right for us. Note that I'm not saying anything about how I believe the twitter algorithm should work, this is just my interpretation of what that commenter meant.
Europe is only a tiny fraction of the world, though.
Compared to India, Japan, Singapore and (depending on the metric) China, the US looks clearly left of center. Compared to most of the Middle East, the US looks extremely left-wing.
This is an interesting point... they're making sure their A/B experiments don't adversely affect Republicans or Democrats. But lots of European countries are skewed more to the left and would broadly look more similar to the "Democrats" group.
Most big companies I've worked at are international and are regulated in many regimes, although sure the one with the main corporate headquarters is more important.
Isn't it intrinsically self-reinforcing, if you have a winner takes all system? It's almost always better to join an existing team than start a new one.
It isn't an attitudinal problem, it is the logical outcome of our political systems. In political science it is known as Duverger's law: single ballot, winner take all systems inevitably tend toward a two party equilibrium.
Changing this requires states to adopt alternative systems, which can sometimes mean amending state constitutions. It isn't easy or straightforward, and the general sense is that there are better things to spend that effort on.
Parties come and go, but there will be two major parties. In fact under such as system if you're in one of those two big parties and you see a third party rising you need to figure out whether it's you or the other guys getting replaced, 'cos it won't stay a three party system for long.
For example in the UK, the Tories ("Conservative and Unionist Party") and Labour are currently the biggest parties, but a hundred years ago this was a novel situation, Labour were seen as a third party, while the Liberal party (which was eventually absorbed into what is today "Liberal Democrats") had seen success over decades and were often in government prior to that point.
A lot of it depends on whether your governing coalitions are formed before or after the election.
The US parties are just coalitions of disparate interests joining together until they (maybe) represent enough people to have a majority and be able to enact their collective interests.
I mean we're on the sixth "party system" in the US too, if that's your standard (it's a new "party system" when there's a significant realignment of which interests find themselves in which parties, either by a reshuffle among existing parties, or by new parties rising and old ones falling). Have you heard much about the Federalists or Whigs lately?
The voting demographics change frequently as well. California has voted to elect more republican presidents than it has democrat ones. It’s voted democrat in the previous 8 elections. In the 10 elections prior to that, 9 times it voted for republican candidates. Texas has also voted for more democrat presidential candidates than republican ones. People who think the US democracy is a rigid and highly predictable system simply have a recency bias.
It's just different order of operations on coalition building. Other systems divide into a majority and opposition at some point. In the US it just happens earlier, but there is the same diversity of opinions within those groups.
You'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
have 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.
Why would throwing more actors with similar capabilities into the mix make the situation any more stable though? That seems like basically the old European Balance of Power, which broke out into open conflict more frequently.
I take the view that the European balance of power probably broke out into open conflict often because of hidden alliances that made it hard for states to correctly gauge the costs of engaging in such conflict.
In the field International Relations, there's lots of discussion around the stability (or instability) of a bipolar distribution of power. Your stance is closer to neorealists, mine is maybe closer to classical realists. Have fun reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_(international_relati... and related links
But from a game theory perspective, having only two powers turns everything into a zero-sum game. I argue that leads to less cooperation and increased divisiveness. Not agreeing with Republicans means you must be a Democrat in their eyes. This "us versus them" mentality is somewhat tribal and leaves little room for nuance.
If I had a magic want, the US would have a 4 party system. Like a cartesian plane with civil liberalism <-> conservatism on one axis and economic liberalism <-> conservatism on the other axis
> Classical realist theorists, such as Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, hold that multipolar systems are more stable than bipolar systems, as great powers can gain power through alliances and petty wars that do not directly challenge other powers; in bipolar systems, classical realists argue, this is not possible.
I suppose they must account for this somehow but isn't that exactly what a series of proxy wars in far-flung places between the United States and the Soviet Union were?
It's been almost 20 years since I studied any of that, but those proxy wars in far-flung places did directly challenge other powers because of the Domino theory
I don't necessarily agree with Morgenthau and Carr as I think most IR Theory is bullshit made up by academia... particularly the stuff around how players "gain power"
So I make my own argument which mostly hinges on the idea that two powers really means "my power" vs. "everyone else" which is not a recipe for peace
This balance is the central theme of the seminal work in the field (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm52s). It may or may not be correct but is one of the most influential texts on the subject.
In some other countries the different interest groups sort themselves into two factions after being elected but I don't know that it is really that different in practice.
It's not different, or rather it doesn't produce meaningfully different outcomes. I'm not aware of any parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of thought and a long record of positive accomplishments. You end up with ruling coalitions which are typically pretty awful.
Ironically, America has one of the most open political systems. You register as one party or the other and vote in primaries. This has lead to a huge variety of people replacing hated mainstream politicians. That's way more than you can say for many other countries.
Anecdotally, a recurring theme in conversations I've had while living abroad is the desire to prune or consolidate some parties.
While both sides in the US have big tents, they are effective in whipping votes when things need to get done.
It also helps that detracting coalition partners can't torpedo their leadership. Historically, factions within a party, like Blue dog dems or Tea partiers, had to wait for an election to litigate their grievances.
Well, yes, this was where I was going. The coalition is just formed before the election takes place. I live in a city with "nonpartisan" elections and I feel like it mostly just makes it difficult to understand what candidates in local elections even stand for.
>it doesn't produce meaningfully different outcomes
It absolutely produces different outcomes than a two party system. Smaller parties make demands as a condition for joining any coalition (or similar arrangement). For example, Canada's NDP only agreed to back the Liberal Government on condition of state funded dental care for children being implemented. Now it is. Millions are affected. Whether you agree with it or not - that is unquestionably a "meaningfully different outcome". Other examples abound if you care to look.
>I'm not aware of any parliamentary system with a wonderful diversity of thought and a long record of positive accomplishments.
That's an impossibly high bar. The standard we're talking about is whether it's better than a two party system.
> It absolutely produces different outcomes than a two party system. Smaller parties make demands as a condition for joining any coalition (or similar arrangement). For example, Canada's NDP only agreed to back the Liberal Government on condition of state funded dental care for children being implemented. Now it is. Millions are affected. Whether you agree with it or not - that is unquestionably a "meaningfully different outcome". Other examples abound if you care to look.
You think logrolling doesn't happen in the American system? Parties are made up of factions who will entertain each other's preferred priorities, which is the exact same thing you're describing except that the parties of the various factions are nominally the same. There's no real natural or obvious philosophical reason why your position on gun ownership should imply a position on environmental regulation, religion, infrastructure buildings, racial politics, abortion, tax policy, and more. We're so used to the groupings that they seem natural but if we go back and looking at older American party systems you'll see parties that don't 100% map onto the contemporary ones, with a blend of some elements we would think of as fitting and others we wouldn't.
It's unquestionably a different dynamic. If the party is in power, then the party is in power. Period. They have less incentive to listen to smaller factions. Do they? I sure hope so. But it's not the same.
Furthermore, these internal deals are more likely to be kept private since theres no benefit to airing everything to the press, the public and the opposition.
In a multi-party system almost all those deals are public. Thus, voters can decide if everyone lived up to their promise.
In some ways it might be worse. Here we had a party that promised to vote with one faction and partly thanks to it survived the election. A few months later they did a 180 and voted the other faction into government. Opinions aside, imagine voting for Sanders only for him to elect Trump or the other way around. With that said, two party version also comes with major flaws.
Majority? Probably. Vast majority? No way. If that were true we'd not keep switching parties between presidents. And Florida, a mostly independent voter state, wouldn't have had DeSantis win in a landslide when he just barely tied last time around.
Or 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)
So 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?
you 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
And 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?
Likely 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.
I 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.
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.
Did 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
Why specifically track political parties? Where is author_is_american? Or author_is_mayonnaise_enjoyer?
Maybe it was a choice made many years ago that they thought was appropriate, but we can't yet know it's not used for other purposes. We can at least be reasonably sure they've added the author_is_elon within the past year. I would have thought there would be many more descriptors, or non-controversial descriptors.
Or maybe Elon specifically added those before releasing this code to get people riled up.
I 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.
They 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.
Well someone just asked about it in the live spaces[1] Elon is hosting and he said that should not be there. An engineer said afterwards it is just for metrics but then Elon chimed in again and said "we should get rid of it, it should be gone."
There are millions of lines of code existent. There are thousands added. Your prior for it being Elon's addition should be something like 10,000/1,000,000 or roughly 1/100. The prior that it wasn't Elon's change is going to be something like 99/100.
When you add the additional information that Elon wants the code removed, but existing Twitter engineers think it appropriate to keep this actually increases the probability of it being added by the existing Twitter engineers and decreases the probability it was added due to Elon.
Obviously, these are rough numbers, but hopefully seeing any numbers at all helps you to get an intuition for the math.
Why is lines of code the appropriate input here? Here's a different computation that is at least as plausible:
There are hundreds of millions of users. Let's say 300M. Only a single one is special-cased in this code: the narcisistic CEO who reportedly went ballistic when his engagement metrics went down. The prior that it's a change done in response to his demands is 299999999/300000000.
(But of course it was added by existing Twitter engineers. The odds of Musk being able to actually commit code to their repository are zero. Even if he had the permissions, the man simply does not have the technical acumen to make even a trivial change.)
I think you are right, my estimate is much much too low.
I'll explain my mistake and why I made it.
I think I thought to use the estimate I did because Elon claimed he didn't know. The prior probability of not knowing something in a code base with millions of lines is very high, but contingent on his involvement in the change the prior that he is aware of it is much higher. So I started the estimate attempt with the probability that I thought better predicted the production of evidence claiming he didn't know.
Your point does raise my estimate substantially, but I think it probably raises it less than you would expect. I don't agree with your 1/300M prior, because I'm aware that hot users get special treatment. I've seen Elon's account thrown around in interview-style questions about hot users before and used as an example of a hot account that needs special treatment. This is something I've witnessed, but it wasn't contingent on Twitter being acquired and it happened prior to Twitter being acquired.
I also don't particularly assign high odds to wanting it, based on the evidence that he claimed to not want it implicitly by wanting it removed. I don't think it seems appropriate to get to near certain probability the he wanted it with the evidence being that he stated that he didn't want it. In my view there isn't a compelling reason for him to lie about this. He owns Twitter, so if he wanted them to have his account monitored that would be a reasonable thing well within his authority. If he wanted it, he doesn't need to pretend to not want it in order to appease someone.
It does seem to me that the odds that the change was added in response to someone thinking he wanted it is much higher than 1%.
> I don't agree with your 1/300M prior, because I'm aware that hot users get special treatment.
That's absolutely fair, and 1/300M was a reductio ad absurdum rather than a serious proposal. Not all users are equal, just like not all lines of code are equal :)
I have a few issues with the "hot user" theory, but they all boil down to the same point: no matter what the use case, you'd never want to do this with a single static user.
Does your infra require special-casing for accounts with more than 100M followers? That should be a flag in the account properties that gets flipped manually or automatically: if these users cause infra problems, you really don't want to be making code changes + full rollouts whenever a new user becomes hot.
Is this just a guard-rail metric, to make sure there's not some bug specifically affecting hot users that tanks their engagement? You'd want a much larger static set than a single account just to ensure there's a large enough number/variety of tweets to compute metrics from. A single user might take a break for a week, or might only be posting very specific kind of content for an extended period of time.
In any case, even if you chose to do this with a single user rather than a set of users, why would Musk be the obvious single choice? He wasn't the most followed Twitter account until two days ago. A year ago there must have been at least a couple of dozen accounts roughly as notable as Musk. The odds of him having been chosen as the special case still would not be very high.
> In my view there isn't a compelling reason for him to lie about this.
The reason to lie about this is that it makes him appear weak, needy, and a target of even more mockery. Given the purchase of Twitter seems to have been a vanity project, having this be exposed and leaving it in goes directly against his apparent goal.
> The reason to lie about this is that it makes him appear weak, needy, and a target of even more mockery. Given the purchase of Twitter seems to have been a vanity project, having this be exposed and leaving it in goes directly against his apparent goal.
I think it only makes sense to think like you are if you've adopted equilibrium assumptions; if you haven't then I find this sort of reasoning to be a conjunction fallacy causing an epistemic closure.
JoshCole is doing a computation to arrive at the conclusion that there's a <1% chance that this code was added after Musk bought Twitter. I'm using the same methodology with at least equally plausible inputs to arrive at there being a >>99% chance of it.
How is that a nitpick? They're diametrically opposite results.
I'm JoshCole and I didn't find your reply to be a nitpick; you are right that the probability ought to be higher than 1%. My calculation was simplistic and I felt it was prudent to arrive at low probability, because I think probability of wanting something given claim of wanting it removed should probably not be anywhere near close to certain. My estimate isn't 1% though. It was just a short thing to share that gave an intuition for why it might be reasonable to assume he didn't know or want it.
In my opinion if you really care about this topic the right thing to do is ask someone at Twitter when the change was made. Getting more information would make us converge on the true estimate faster than arguing the odds IMO. Feel free to update me with the results if you do end up doing that so I can adjust my beliefs accordingly. I'm not going to try to gain this information, because I don't think the question matters much.
Of course he did because it makes him look bad and he's desperate for praise and attention.
What he wanted was everything that feature provides, without it ever being shown that it's there. But since he refuses to hire PR people and almost certainly came up with this idea in the last few days, no one was paid to hide its existence.
The next story out of Twitter will be the remaining engineers being threatened because Musk can't see his tweet statistics any more.
I read the code snippet before I saw the link and thought you were joking, but yeah, there really is an author_is_elon flag right there in the main branch.
How hard would it be to replace this entire algorithm with the following pseudocode?
If !user.follows_author(author) then don't show tweet on timeline
Else if tweet.timestamp is later than all other tweets show tweet first
This is vastly superior to any other possible recommendation algorithm because users can choose what tweets they see/don't see by whom they follow and everybody has an equal chance to have their tweets seen by their followers. When Twitter moved away from this, it rendered my timeline useless so I started just pulling up people's profiles to read their tweets in order and eventually deleted my (pseudonymous) account that had several thousand followers. Almost nobody was seeing my tweets anyway thanks to this algorithm and deleting the account did not prevent me from browsing accounts I'm interested in.
All Elon needed to do to fix Twitter was to reverse all of the bad changes they've made since 2015 or so and restore the platform to what it was in the late 00s/early 10s.
Those aren't redundant or collinear though? Maybe you are surprised they didn't encode this as an integer "num_images"? It is fairly common to one hot encode ordinal variables with only a few common/possible values this way.
True, it still seems odd to encode an explicitly ordinal variable as categorical (particularly one with a small finite range, in contrast to the follower logarithmic bucket ones), but Twitter's layout is weird enough that it could be a impactful difference in terms of engagement.
This is (weirdly) common in production ML codebases written by software engineers. Like you, I have no idea why unless it's a memory optimisation (where you count 4+ as many).
Having every column as a boolean (0/1) means you can treat it as a bitmap. As an (entirely fictional) example, imagine if you wanted to get the features of a thread instead of a single tweet. You could do it as a union of all the tweets:
Ok that makes lots of sense from an engineering perspective. It's pretty insane from a statistical perspective though, which I think was the original point.
Probably exactly the most boring, mundane way you would expect: they managed to contact the owner of what was probably a dead/inactive account and then paid them some money for it.
It's against the Twitter terms to pay money for accounts. I think more likely is that Twitter 'seized' the dead account and just granted it to her. I'm sure for instance someone had previously squatted on accounts like "VP" or "England"
Could be that those in charge of preparing this open sourced repository did it begrudgingly, and so they perceived the fact that it looked bad as a positive thing. "Hey, you wanted us to release the code. Happy now?"
Why are you assuming this knowledge is harmful to them? What do you think it means for their business?
No other social media platform will have this sort of accountability and public pressure to be better like having their recommendation algorithms public.
private val DarkRequestAnnotation = "clnt/has_dark_request"
private val Democrats = "democrats"
private val Republicans = "republicans"
private val Elon = "elon"
private val Vits = "vits"
Wait, am I missing something here or author name is cleary mentioned as elon here while musk’s twitter id it @elonmusk? Why is everyone assuming this code is about elon?
I mean yeah it must be elon we know but what I was mostly curious about was if it’s actually meant for him only, why didn’t they use his twitter handle? And just elon? I am not a developer I must mention it looks like. And I was genuinely curious.
"author_is_elon" (notice the _ ) is a name the developer writing that code came up with for a category of twitter users. it has nothing to do with twitter handles. he could have chosen any name, but since that category includes only elon musk, he named it like that.
Per Zoe:
The code that was released today doesn't show the parts that actually alter the scores of Elon and other users. The part of the code referenced below just tracks Elon stats (from what I know). Employees removed most PII before the code was released.
The “author_is_elon” flag may have been assigned to him because Elon’s Twitter account has the most followers on the platform.
So, for technical / performance reasons, changes to the algos might want to be benchmarked against this account in particular, because it’s the account most likely to be at the centre of capacity- / load-related issues.
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