Elon Musk Pulls Back the Veil on Twitter's Algorithm, and Researches Discover a New Category of Algorithm Interventions: "GovernmentRequested"

The government was requesting that certain accounts and topics be limited, and others be amplified, that Twitter made up a tag for government requests to throttle information it didn't like and amplify propaganda it did like.

On Friday, Twitter released the recommendation algorithm portion of its code by publishing it on GitHub, where developers post open source software data. Developer Steven Tey dug into the code and found that there is a mechanism through which the US government can "intervene" with the code.

"When needed, the government can intervene with the Twitter algorithm," Tey wrote. "In fact, @TwitterEng (Twitter Engineering) even has a class for it -- 'GovernmentRequested.'"

Tey linked directly to the code on GitHub.

On March 17, Musk announced he was going to make the algorithm open source later in the month and said, "Our 'algorithm' is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things , but we'll patch issues as soon as they're found!"

David French calls this mere "jawboning" by the government, and reminds you that government has free speech rights too, and most of these free speech rights involve stripping citizens of their free speech rights. Just like the Constitution promises!

More from Hot Air. Twitter's algorithm also empowers liberals to effectively silence conservatives, just by blocking them.

The algorithm slaps a huge penalty on any accounts which have been blocked or muted, making them all-but-radioactive as far as being promoted on Twitter.

This is designed to appease leftists -- who for years and years have been running mass-blocks. If you've ever found that you're blocked by an account you haven't ever interacted with, it's because leftists assemble huge lists of people that they think should be blocked, and then other leftists just take that mass block list and execute it. (I think this can be done with the push of a button.)

The net result is that virtually every conservative on twitter is blocked by nearly every leftwing user -- which the algorithm then takes as proof that those accounts should never, ever be promoted and may even be throttled and prevented from being seen by anyone.

Meanwhile, Musk stripped the New York Times of its blue check. They'll now have to pay for the blue check if they want to pretend at being "verified."

This never should have happened -- but Twitter did it, I'm sure, knowing that this fair-on-its-face algorithm intervention would have enormous consequences on conservatives' speech, given that almost every leftwinger proudly announces which mass-block lists he's implementing.

People who mass-block should not have their mass-blocks incorporated into the algorithm for deciding who is worth promoting and who needs to be suppressed. If someone only has 50 accounts blocked, then they've probably made a real decision about each of those blocks, and maybe it's fair to ding the blocked accounts as far as promotion.

But if someone has blocked ten thousand accounts, then obviously that person has never, ever interacted with most of those blocked accounts, and is just employing a block list to never see a point of view that disagrees with his own. Such mass blocks should be deweighted in importance down to having zero impact, once the list gets long enough.

Elon Musk has made his first big blue check takedown, and his target is one of the most esteemed newspapers in the world.

Twitter previously announced that on Saturday, it would begin "winding down" its "legacy verified program" by removing badges they deemed "legacy verified checkmarks." The move is designed to get users to pay an $8 monthly fee to retain the blue check as part of the company's "Twitter Blue" service.

The New York Times, which has 54.9 million followers on the social media platform, became the most prominent account thus far to lose its blue check.
...

The Times announced earlier this week it was not going to pay the fee to retain its badge, nor would it reimburse any of its staffers. Nearly all other major U.S. journalistic outlets have made the same decision.

Musk was not kind about the Times.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn't even interesting

Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It's unreadable.

They would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles.

Same applies to all publications.

posted by Ace at 03:33 PM

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