Twitter’s feed algorithm is harmful

We all know that Twitter is a cesspool of spambots, far right users, incels and outright Nazis. We know this has much to do with who gets promoted by the algorithms they use. One of these algorithms is the feed algorithm.

If you don’t know, most social media don’t show you just the posts from people you follow, in the order they are posted. Instead they fill your feed with suggestions – and they post the posts completely out of order. This is nominally done to create engagement, but in Twitter’s case, it is also used to push specific transphobic, misogynist, racist viewpoints.

In Twitter you can choose between algorithmic suggestions and getting a chronological timeline of the posts by the accounts you follow. If you choose a chronological feed, it will revert ba ck to the algorithmic feed after a while (or at least it did so when I was active on Twitter).

An interesting study in Nature by Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, shows the danger of Twitters algorithmic feed

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

There is no disclosure of Twitter’s ranking of suggestions, so people have no way of knowing that using the algorithm. will expose them only to one biased, and often highly incorrect, worldview.

This is something that both the EU and the US need to address legally. No platform should push one specific viewpoint over another, and definitely not in such a hidden way. Yes, the usership of a site have biases, which will probably reflect in the algorithmic feed, but the bias should not be pushed by the website itself.

Lazy linking

A few, often slightly older, articles on the internet that I have come across and find interesting enough to share.

The Collectible Coins That Celebrate the Dark Side of American Policing

The first military challenge coins, one story goes, were handed out in 1969 by a US Army colonel to build camaraderie in his Special Forces unit. He took the idea from a National Guardsman who had required his troops to always keep a sixpence coin on them in order to buy drinks for their buddies. (Soldiers caught empty-handed during a “coin check” typically must buy a round.) By the 1980s, the silver dollar–size medallions had taken off in the military and beyond. Corporations gave them out to employees. Numismatists collected them. And as cops began equipping themselves and acting more like soldiers, they started minting their own. These law enforcement challenge coins often embrace the unpolished side of the “warrior cop” ethos—the violence, racism, and impunity that have sparked our current reckoning with American police culture.

The AI Boardroom Gap (pdf)

There’s a widening gap between bold AI ambition and reality. Most organizations aren’t failing at AI because of the technology, but because their foundations can’t support it.

This report is quite uncritical of AI, but it shines the light on a very real problem – the differences in AI ambitions and the reality of a lot of companies. In my opinion, this is to a large part due to AI being oversold to the CEOs and boardmembers of companies, so they expect a lot more from it, than is realistic in most organizations. For example, AI has been promoted as a tool to make programmers up to a magnitude more productive, but we struggle to find any real evidence of this. If you base your strategy around 10x programmers, then it will not work.

Speaking of evidence for AI and system development:

Does AI Really Make Coders More Productive?

The big headline? On average, AI coding assistants give developers a 15-20% productivity boost across industries. That’s solid—imagine finishing your work 15-20% faster! But it’s not the same for everyone. Claims that developers see a ten fold (10x) boost in productivity are not very contextually helpful. Some teams saw huge jumps, while others actually got less productive. Why? It depends on a few key factors.

On top of that, I can add that this article from last year, showed that AI can decrease productivity in some cases:

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation.

In fairness, I should add that they have found more AI-positive results in later studies, but they find their their own design lacking and states “We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design“

It is escalating

First the arrested and charged Democratic politicians like Rep .LaMonica McIver and Senator Alex Padilla and now they are killing them.

Horrifying news out of Minnesota

Melissa Hortman, the top Democratic lawmaker in the Minnesota House, was shot and killed in a suspected politically-motivated assassination along with her husband early Saturday.

The suspect in the attack at Hortman’s home in Brooklyn Park is impersonating a police officer and remains at large, according to authorities.

Minnesota Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were also shot multiple times at their home in Champlin, but are expected to survive, according to Gov. Tim Walz.

PZ has more

This is clearly not just about political differences, if anyone still believed that. Now one group is trying to suppress the rest of the country through threats, the use of force, and outright murder.

The Onion buys Infowars

This sounds like a parody article from the Onion, but it is true: The Onion wins auction for Alex Jones’ media company

Alex Jones’ media empire has been sold at auction, and the winner is The Onion. No Joke.

The satirical news outlet bought Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, backed by a group of Connecticut families. Jones said on today’s show that security has notified him he needs to vacate the premises this morning.

Proceeds of the sale will go to paying down Jones’ nearly $1.5 billion debt to families of Sandy Hook victims who won two defamation suits against him for spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which Jones said never happened. He accused the families of being actors, faking the killing of 20 children and 6 educators, in an effort to drum up support for gun control, and Jones supporters who believed the lies threatened and harassed the families for years.

It is no secret that Alex Jones was hoping for some of this allies to buy Infowars and let him keep the brand. Alas, for him, this was not to be. And he is not taking it well:

“We’re going out like vikings with swords in our arms,” he said. He’s accusing the auction house of rigging rules against him to benefit the families.

“At the last minute, the rules of the auction changed,” he alleged yesterday. “What was going to be an open auction where you […] could offer more money and top [previous] bids, but now they’ve decided that it’ll just be sealed and there’s one bid and whoever’s the highest gets it.”

For a tough guy, he whines a lot, doesn’t he?

As to why the Onion, or rather its parent company, bought Infowars, I think I will let the explain themselves

Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’

Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.

What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.

As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.

Infinite Growth Forever,

Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO

Sweet justice with a twist of satire. What more could we want?

Lazy linking

A few interesting reads on the internet

Pro-Trump defamation attorney Lin Wood must pay former law partners $4.5 million after defaming them as ‘criminal’ extortionists on social media

This sounds like it started out with normal stuff happening when a company split, but clearly Lin Wood have learned from Trump and started defaming his former partners

How Black female science fiction and fantasy writers are upending the narrative

Science fiction has always been a way to envision the future. Sometimes for the optimal; sometimes as the future might be if humans do not zig toward the good and just. As the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote, “the saddest aspect of life right now is that science fiction gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

Black women have always gathered knowledge faster than society writ large gathers wisdom. Thus, a Black woman science fiction — or fantasy — writer might be the most prescient writers of these genres. The field has long been run by mostly white men: the J.R.R. Tolkiens, Philip K. Dicks and George R. R. Martins of the field. But the popularity and foresight of a handful of Black female writers proves that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today.

What I especially love about this article is that I became aware of it because John Scalzi shared it on Threads. He is always trying to promote diversity and promote other people.

Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia

Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.

They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.

They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.

It is a long read, but well worth reading. It is a important view into people who are actively trying to destroy democracy by violent means.

Did Hemingway say “write drunk, edit sober”? Nope—he preferred to write sober.

Writers love to cite Ernest Hemingway’s famous advice, “write drunk, edit sober.” But not only did he not actually say that—he practically said the opposite.

It is one of those annoying quotes that goes around, and it is nice to get it debunked

This is the type of person Tucker, Trump etc sucks up to

Putin is not a nice person. He is a despot and a warmonger.

Today we saw another piece of evidence for this, as yet another of his critics was killed

Putin critic Alexei Navalny, 47, dies in Arctic Circle jail

Russia’s most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died in an Arctic Circle jail, the prison service has said.

It is highly likely he was killed directly, but even if the death wasn’t caused by a direct murder, it was still caused indirectly by Putin by sending him to this harsh prison. I don’t, however, believe for a second that he wasn’t murdered – it is not like it was the first attempt to kill him after all

Most of the Russian president’s critics have fled Russia, but Alexei Navalny returned in January 2021, after months of medical treatment. In August 2020 he was poisoned at the end of a trip to Siberia with a Novichok nerve agent.

Yet despite this, and the invasion of Ukraine, you have powerful people in the US singing Putin’s praise. You have so-called journalists interviewing him and Trump praising him, even encouraging him to attack US allies.

For the best dissection of Tucker Carlson’s interview of Putin, I highly recommend Knowledge Fight’s podcast episode on it.

Hitler is obviously maligned

At least according to a tweet by David Josef Volodzko, a Seattle Time editorial writer.

Text of tweet by Volodzko

The text of the tweet states:

In fact, while Hitler has become the great symbol of evil in history books, he too was less evil than Lenin because Hitler only targeted people he personally believed were harmful to society, whereas Lenin targeted even those he himself did not believe were harmful in any way.

Both Lenin and Hitler generally targeted categories of people rather than individuals, and they did not care whether they personally could be considered harmful to society or not, but rather whether they were undesirable or as a group could be considered harmful to society (by whatever warped measures they used to determine that). Trying to make any comparison between Hitler and someone else, where you decide Hitler is less bad, is making an excuse for Hitler. You can say that Lenin was bad, without saying that Hitler was less bad.

Unsurprisingly, and quite correctly, the tweet led to Seattle Time firing him.

Seattle Times note on firing Volodzko

 

The text says:

A Seattle Times editorial writer engaged in Twitter recently in a way that is inconsistent with our company values and those of our family ownership. Effective immediately, he is no longer employed by The Seattle Times. While we passionately believe in creating lively discoruse through a variety of viewpoints, we do so with respect and appreciation for all communities. We apologize for any pain we have caused  our readers, our employees and the community.

Volodzko also apologized in a twitter thread, though his first tweet mischaracterized what he had actually stated in his now deleted tweet

 

The tweet says:

I recently argued Lenin was more evil than Hitler for wanting to kill more people while Hitler was more evil for actually doing it. Let me say sorry to anyone hurt or offended by that because regardless of my intentions, the comparison is a dangerous one.

This is, of course, not what he argued, but at least he seems to have understood that it is comparison that gives covers to White Supremacists and (neo-)Nazis.

 

 

Apparently there are consequences after all

Boris Johnson has resigned as a MP due to the result of the investigations into the partygate scandal, which is the scandal that forced him to resign as a PM. The results of the investigations are not public, and Johnson has stepped down, rather than getting pushed out. Considering the number of lies and falsehoods he have presented over time, both as a journalist and as a politician, it is rather incredible that he ever managed to become a MP, let alone the PM.

And in similar news, as most of you probably know, Donald Trump has been hit with a 37-count indictment for his mishandling of classified documents, and his behavior relating to this:

The 49-page indictment contains the first-ever federal charges against a former US president. It says the classified documents Mr Trump stored in his boxes contained information about:

  • United States nuclear programmes
  • Defence and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries
  • Potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack
  • Plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack

Prosecutors say that when Mr Trump left office, he took about 300 classified files to Mar-a-Lago – his oceanfront home in Palm Beach, which is also an expansive private members’ club.

The charge sheet notes that Mar-a-Lago hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests, including in a balDonald Trumlroom where documents were found.

Prosecutors say Mr Trump tried to obstruct the FBI inquiry into the missing documents by suggesting that his lawyer “hide or destroy” them, or tell investigators he did not have them.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Mr. Trump said to one of his attorneys, according to the indictment.

Source:

Of course, an indictment doesn’t mean a conviction, nor does it keep Trump from running for the Presidency, but it _is_ the first step of getting him put into jail.

A couple of good US court rulings

There is no doubt that the news out of the US Supreme Court has been abyssal this year, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the rest of the US courts, where there have been a number of good rulings.

Among these are the nearly $1.5 billion rulings against Alex Jones, the sanctions against Trump lawyers, and a course a number of cases involving Trump, where the judges have allowed the cases to go forward.

Now, a couple of new pieces of good news can be added:

Jacob Wohl, Jack Burkman must spend 500 hours registering voters as penance for phony robocalls targeting Black voters in Cleveland

A judge on Tuesday ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two right-wing conspiracy theorists behind robocalls that sought to intimidate Black voters here out of casting mail-in ballots in the 2020 presidential election, to spend 500 hours registering voters in low-income neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C., area.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge John Sutula placed each on two years of probation, fined each $2,500 and ordered them to wear GPS ankle monitors with home confinement beginning at 8 p.m. each day for the first six months of their probation.

Sutula, 71, said that most of the civil rights advances in the United States have occurred in his lifetime. He compared the men’s effort to those who used violence to suppress southern Black voters in the 1960s.
Jacob Wohl is scum, and it is good that there are real consequences for his actions.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia, has been found guilty of seditious conspiracy, a charge arising from the attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.

Rhodes and co-defendant Kelly Meggs are the first people in nearly three decades to be found guilty of the rarely used civil war-era charge at trial. The trial was the biggest test yet for the US justice department in its efforts to hold accountable those responsible for the attack that shook the foundations of US democracy.

This appears to be a clear cut case of justice prevailing – if this wasn’t a case of seditious conspiracy, what is? But some times these things are harder to prove in court than would appear logical, so we should be glad that the US justice department managed to get the convictions.

Congratulations France

The projection is in, and Emmanuel Macron has secured a clear victory over Marine Le Pen.

It s scary that Marine Le Pen was a runner-up, but this is the first time in 20 years that a French president has been elected to a second term, and the 1st time ever, it has happened, when the president had a majority in Parliament.

Macron could not have won, if the left had not voted for him over Le Pen. Many stayed home, but luckily, many understood the importance of voting against Le Pen, and her ultra-right party.