alt.hn

4/24/2025 at 4:57:08 PM

Manufactured consensus on x.com

 https://rook2root.co/articles/20250424-manufacturing-consensus-on-x

by cogitovirus

4/24/2025 at 7:54:44 PM

It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are spammed by hate bots and then making those posts visible.

https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk...

I've also seen evidence of posts Twitter likes (violent and hateful anti-immigration posts - literally a photo of a dummy tied to a chair being shot in the back of the head) being spammed by love bots.

Twitter seems to be a propaganda channel, run by Donald/Elon/et al.

by casenmgreen

4/24/2025 at 8:09:21 PM

It's a propaganda platform since Musk bought it.

Im saying this for ages and never joked.

Plenty of real situations happening like blocking certain people, stoping of fact checking, bot protection and detection etc.

There is a reason why Twitter needed more people before

by Tireings

4/24/2025 at 8:29:03 PM

[flagged]

by fourseventy

4/24/2025 at 9:01:01 PM

Yeah I mean, if the only reason you said that was to "piss off the libs" and hate on transgender men, you really shouldn't be shocked that a platform doesn't want that. Being unable to say hateful things without consequence on social media isn't the same as it being a propaganda machine.

by Llamamoe

4/24/2025 at 8:56:16 PM

I doubt you have any proof of that happening...

by viraptor

4/24/2025 at 10:21:32 PM

https://www.foxnews.com/world/spanish-politician-suspended-b...

by michtzik

4/24/2025 at 10:43:09 PM

Suspended not banned. Also, in context the tweet was saying that the trans man was not a man and that was against the policy at the time. The pregnancy was just a detail there.

by viraptor

4/24/2025 at 10:58:43 PM

surely you realize that this is entertainment outlet is not a news organization, nor does this entertainment outlet have any obligation to report anything on a factual, truthful or verifiable basis? and that this entertainment outlet is famously bigoted?

by GuinansEyebrows

4/25/2025 at 7:08:11 AM

[flagged]

by bheadmaster

4/24/2025 at 9:00:06 PM

>It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are spammed by hate bots and then making those posts visible.

>https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk...

This could also very well be explained by a ranking algorithm that optimizes for "engagement". Getting spammed by hate bots = "engagement". This would be perfectly consistent with what the guy is experiencing, minus the accusation that the platform is suppressing anti-ukraine posts, which is totally unsubstantiated.

by gruez

4/24/2025 at 9:56:47 PM

As I understanding the timing, the post was suppressed until the hate bots spammed it.

Given the post was suppressed, how did the hate bots know about it to spam it?

It seems to me Twitter suppressed the post until they had time to spam it with hate posts.

Bear in mind here also this suppression did not happen for other posts - only for the pro-Ukraine post - so Twitter at the least is specifically suppressing pro-Ukraine posts.

by casenmgreen

4/24/2025 at 11:07:54 PM

>It seems to me Twitter suppressed the post until they had time to spam it with hate posts.

Twitter can't spam hate posts in real time? They're literally an AI company.

>Bear in mind here also this suppression did not happen for other posts - only for the pro-Ukraine post - so Twitter at the least is specifically suppressing pro-Ukraine posts.

There's scant evidence of this, besides the vague assertion that "I have 5k more followers there and regularly have posts which are viewed over 100k times". If he normally posts informative and substantive content that gets good engagement, is it really surprising that a generic "I support Zelensky" post would get poor engagement?

by gruez

4/25/2025 at 5:55:08 AM

I’d bet that their tech is weaker than what people expect. Perhaps a better term would be “not as robust as expected”.

by intended

4/25/2025 at 10:51:04 AM

> Twitter can't spam hate posts in real time? They're literally an AI company.

I would expect they have a certain capacity and the flow of posts is very, very, very great.

Also, I would imagine a delay of some sort anyway - people would notice if a post immediately received hundred of one line generic "I hate this" replies. In this case, the hate posts began after 12 hours.

> is it really surprising that a generic "I support Zelensky" post would get poor engagement?

I may be wrong, but as I understand it, what you've described here is not what was described by the author.

As I understand it : one guy, two accounts, both long term, one BSky, one Twitter, same content. Approx same and large number of followers. On BSky, the test post has immediate, large-scale and positive response. On Twitter, this and this only post suppressed for IIRC 12 hours, then a massive number of hate-bot posts and then post made visible.

by casenmgreen

4/24/2025 at 8:02:16 PM

important notes from the essay, this not unique to twitter:

> And if you think this only happens on one social network, you’re already caught in the wrong attention loop.

> The most effective influence doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t censor loudly, or boost aggressively. It shapes perception quietly — one algorithmic nudge at a time.

by OmarShehata

4/24/2025 at 8:09:16 PM

FWIW, I don't think the person you are responding to said it only happens on Twitter. Just that it happens on Twitter.

by readhistory

4/24/2025 at 9:32:10 PM

This definitely happens on other platforms as well but there is a key difference in noting that twitter is now privately owned by a single person who has shown themself to be insecure and prone to lashing publicly at critics.

I think twitter is uniquely concentrated in its influence by its owner and willingness to do things so blatantly, other platforms need to at least pretend to not steer things so directly as not to upset shareholders.

by awkwabear

4/24/2025 at 8:00:50 PM

Yeah, artificial delays in content delivery is silently spreading. It's not just Twitter.

Edit: is this why 4chan was hit with the disruption - because there's no room for this delay mechanism?

by numpad0

4/24/2025 at 8:43:33 PM

No, 4chan was hacked because hideyuki has terrible security hygiene and didn't update shit. Same thing happened to 2channel a decade prior.

by kmeisthax

4/25/2025 at 3:56:33 PM

social media is either making money via ads, or making money by shaping consensus.

what approach do you think HN takes, and how many bots do you think are here? Cuz I don't see any ads...

by red-iron-pine

4/24/2025 at 10:06:23 PM

Billionaire buys social network for instant cultural and political influence. Including amplifying his own posts. Yet, hardly any alarm from the tech or mainstream

by hn1986

4/25/2025 at 12:10:31 AM

[dead]

by TacticalCoder

4/24/2025 at 7:02:55 PM

It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies.

We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.

by zoogeny

4/24/2025 at 8:34:11 PM

It's hard to see how this wasn't by design. Elon loudly released the source code to the algorithm so SEO engineers could optimize their systems to have total control over the narrative. Sure "anybody can read it", but realistically only propagandists are going to go to the trouble and then have the time and resources to act on it.

He basically handed the site over to the IRA and told them to go nuts.

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 9:02:11 PM

The ‘ra? Did I miss a step here?

by tclancy

4/24/2025 at 7:29:57 PM

That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate.

Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscrolling, no algorithmic nudging, no subtle behavioral conditioning. Influence may be the new capital, but opting out is still a form of agency. Disengagement can be a powerful act.

We often forget: participation isn’t mandatory.

by razster

4/24/2025 at 7:39:51 PM

I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff.

Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics.

Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without support.

Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would never invest my time into building relationships on a platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community is broken permanently.

by stevenAthompson

4/24/2025 at 8:47:15 PM

Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies.

Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.

But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile.

He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.

by jandrese

4/25/2025 at 2:54:59 AM

He did not baselessly claim a critic was a pedophile. He baselessly claimed the first foreign rescuer called to the scene [1], who called in his friends who successfully navigated and mapped the caves and found the kids, a pedophile.

[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/exclusive-interview-with...

by Veserv

4/24/2025 at 9:04:58 PM

> In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.

You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it? Also, I can't find the source for this bet, only some bets about covid, and whether the tesla roadster could be built at all.

by gruez

4/24/2025 at 9:15:46 PM

> You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it?

What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it.

Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward.

by Dylan16807

4/24/2025 at 9:30:20 PM

>What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun

If you start off a sentence with "Some cracks started to form in this when", and then describe a situation using negative adjectives (ie. "reckless"), it's fair for most assume that the "recklessness" was your justification for the aforementioned claim. If that detail is irrelevant to your argument, then you shouldn't include it.

As for the object level question of whether taking such a bet is "reckless" at all. It's entirely impossible to tell without knowing the bet amount, and his finances at the time. Musk was recently able to take a $40B hit to his finances when he was forced to buy twitter (after trying to back out), with seemingly little consequence, so it's unclear whether an absurdly large bet would actually be "reckless".

>Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward.

Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.

by gruez

4/24/2025 at 10:27:53 PM

You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X, then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.

> Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.

I don't see how this affects anything the GP said.

by Dylan16807

4/24/2025 at 11:12:36 PM

>You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X, then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.

It's called confirming what your opponent's argument is, so you're not arguing against a strawman. If you check how the OP actually replied, it seems like he entirely abandoned the "he kept it all for himself" objection.

by gruez

4/24/2025 at 9:36:42 PM

Oh it was reckless. That was the era when built quality was rock bottom. People were getting cars that were missing parts, or where things were attached completely wrong.[1] He was expanding production so fast that it caused a serious liquidity crunch at Tesla. But he got lucky and managed to squeeze through the problem.

I will have to look harder to find the name of the investor whom Elon made the production bet against, but I think this article is talking about it: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/tesla-workers-in-ga4-tent-de...

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 9:47:23 PM

>I will have to look harder to find the name of the investor whom Elon made the production bet against, but I think this article is talking about it: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

Unless there's something the article totally omitted, your original retelling of the story was heavily misleading. For one, it's not a bet and is seemingly actually a performance bonus, which nearly every F500 company has for their executives. As such, there was very little downside if he lost the bet. It's also unclear why CEOs trying to hit aggressive performance targets is a bad thing in and of itself. You could still object to it on the basis of bad working conditions for workers, or corners cut on the product being made, but you mentioned none of that in your original comment, which seems to imply you were fine with all of those things, and was only upset that Musk didn't share in the rewards (???).

by gruez

4/24/2025 at 8:51:30 PM

Based on some of the videos of him it looks like its Ketamine.

by PaulKeeble

4/25/2025 at 10:12:08 AM

for anyone interested: https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-p...

by pas

4/25/2025 at 3:11:20 PM

Thanks for sharing that.

The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link.

Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms described here.

The rise in legalization seems, anecdotally, to match the "normalization" of tin-foil hat thinking in society. Years ago Dan Quayle was essentially disqualified from office for misspelling potato, now Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly decries the Jewish Space Lasers and nobody blinks. I feel like there has to be more to societies changes over the last ~25 years than "the internet".

by stevenAthompson

4/25/2025 at 5:45:02 PM

> The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization.

Are we switching the horse and cart places here? It's highly likely that people resort to drugs in order to cope with the distress caused by conspiracy talk. Musk is using drugs as stimulants to increase his "productivity" which is the other common reason for taking drugs. BTW, his "productivity" isn't the source of his success, but that's tangential here.

In both cases, conspiracies aren't the root cause and fighting them ends up fighting free speech without reducing either conspiracies or drug use.

The same is true for the normalization of wild conspiracies - MTG followers aren't engaging in them because of drugs, they are doing it because MTG is promoting them from a place of authority and bot-love. If you think she's not playing by a script but simply spilling out the contents of her concerned heart... you know very little about propaganda.

by bigbadfeline

4/24/2025 at 7:51:44 PM

I think we should be careful of too much cynicism (although too little is bad as well). There is the old Aesop tale of the fox and the grapes. Being unable to reach the grapes the fox sulks away saying "they were probably sour".

There is a lot to gain for the powerful if they can convince those that they wish to hold that power over that the "grapes are sour", so to speak. That leaves less people fighting for the few grapes available, as we stretch this analogy to its breaking point.

No man is an island, and all that. If the holders of influence decide to start a war, you are in it if you like it or not.

by zoogeny

4/24/2025 at 8:02:28 PM

There's no probably here, and it is healthy to avoid social media platforms run by people who perform nazi salutes in public and attempt to destroy democracy.

by grey-area

4/24/2025 at 10:10:47 PM

Agreed, I don’t think the analogy holds in this case. Elon is grape maker and he can dole out sour or sweet grapes as he pleases. No point in eating them if you don’t favor him because he often gives out sour ones to those folks.

by tyleo

4/24/2025 at 7:27:26 PM

It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/

But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v...

That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/

The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding.

You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.

by Jordan-117

4/24/2025 at 7:35:04 PM

AKA the “Nazi bar” problem.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar

by ceejayoz

4/24/2025 at 8:37:28 PM

One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps, how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech absolutism that has been abused.

In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end.

During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned.

Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech".

And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself.

Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them.

[0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules.

[1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow.

See also https://xkcd.com/898/

[2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/

by kmeisthax

4/24/2025 at 11:28:00 PM

Yes, but eventually normal people will just end up leaving.

by archagon

4/24/2025 at 6:53:23 PM

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

by mrdoops

4/24/2025 at 7:09:24 PM

I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art).

Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments that add nothing to the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.

by jampa

4/24/2025 at 7:13:31 PM

I've been there for 17 (!) years, and I could have written pretty much the same message as you since around 2012. Dennis Kucinich was a huge campaign!

But I agree, since the API thing, it has sucked HARD.

by kridsdale3

4/24/2025 at 7:41:04 PM

I agree, the API change was the last nail in the coffin, honestly. Reddit was always bad for several reasons, but it always had some availability of smart people that placed it alongside StackExchange and Hacker News. But 2022 and 2023 really saw a mass exodus of expertise from Reddit (and Twitter, etc.)

Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.

by lynndotpy

4/25/2025 at 1:59:19 PM

My account on Reddit, and so as I was the founder also the sub r/AmazonRedshift, was in Sep 2023 banned by an automated system.

The sub was working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly.

After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted).

Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit was trying by shadowbanning to lead me into thinking my account was still active.

I used a utility to scramble (you can't delete) all the posts I'd ever made to Reddit, and closed my account.

(There's a bit of a happy ending - about a year later someone who was doing work with Reddit and had an archive of all my poss sent them to me, as a thank you. I processed the JSON and put them up on my Redshift site.)

by Max-Ganz-II

4/24/2025 at 7:52:49 PM

I like how you both responded to GP's roast of "I agree" comments by saying "I agree". Maybe that was intentional.

Anyway, I agree. I used Reddit fairly regularly before the API change, though I was already starting to get disenfranchised by the political hive mind by that point. The death of FOSS third party clients that made the platform bearable to use was the straw that broke the camel's back, for me. I've completely left it behind since.

by seanw444

4/24/2025 at 9:28:07 PM

The complaint was about comments that are functionally an overly large upvote, not comments that have the word agree in them.

by Dylan16807

4/25/2025 at 4:34:10 PM

I know, but it's still funny.

by seanw444

4/24/2025 at 10:43:53 PM

I hate that they took Apollo app from us.

by kridsdale3

4/24/2025 at 7:36:20 PM

Missing the Kucinich connection here, what's the lore?

by polynomial

4/24/2025 at 10:44:49 PM

First major presidential campaign astroturfing on a social media site. If you looked at Reddit (I dont remember what year it was, 2008? 2012?) you'd think 60% of America was dead set on the guy. It was less than 1%.

by kridsdale3

4/24/2025 at 8:00:56 PM

> I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art).

This didn’t start with the API change drama. The API change protests were their own crusade. The calls to ban Twitter links or AI art are just the next iterations of the same form of protest.

Many of the big subs were thoroughly astroturfed long before the API changes. The famous ones like /r/conservative weren’t even trying to hide the fact that they curated every member and post

by Aurornis

4/24/2025 at 9:09:46 PM

>This didn’t start with the API change drama

The proximate cause IMO is that the protests (ie. moderators shutting down their subreddits) resulted in some moderators being deposed, causing new subreddits and moderators to come in power, which were easier to astroturf or whatever.

by gruez

4/24/2025 at 7:57:59 PM

Happy to see posts like this, I have the same experience. It fell apart a few years ago with the fiasco's and it's a shell of what it was now. Total echo chamber. Sadly seems to be spreading to HN in some comment sections. And X has it's problems in the other direction. There aren't many places left like how it was, when up and down votes meant something.

by DustinBrett

4/24/2025 at 7:54:46 PM

> Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments that add nothing to the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.

That has been the case for over 10 years now. It's absolutely not a new phenomenon.

by andrepd

4/24/2025 at 8:00:05 PM

It got much worse a few years ago. I am a daily Reddit user and it was a big difference.

by DustinBrett

4/24/2025 at 8:39:10 PM

I feel so old that I remember the post-2016 election when Reddit started down this path. It's been particularly bad in the last few years but agree. Ever since the_donald and the admin's reactions to it, it's been bad.

by CSMastermind

4/24/2025 at 11:45:43 PM

Damn, 2016 was almost 10 years ago. When I said 10 I was more thinking 2010-2011

by andrepd

4/24/2025 at 7:58:30 PM

The API shutdown allows a flooding of bots, crippled 3rd party apps and the moderator tools that kept things clean.

But I don't think the "crusades" are always bot related. Movements get momentum.

by unethical_ban

4/24/2025 at 9:07:19 PM

>The API shutdown allows a flooding of bots, crippled 3rd party apps and the moderator tools that kept things clean.

I thought they backed down on the API changes for moderators?

by gruez

4/25/2025 at 5:16:16 AM

Not just lately. See /r/politics. Sometime in the last 5-7 years /r/science or /r/technology (or both, I forget because I stopped reading) basically became the science/tech versions of /r/politics.

by windsignaling

4/24/2025 at 7:36:51 PM

> now it is against banning AI Art

AI art does not exist. There is only slop stolen from artists.

by os2warpman

4/24/2025 at 9:10:16 PM

Gatekeeping the definition of art probably doesn't help your cause. Even if you convince everyone to say, I don't know, "algorithmically generated images" instead, have you really improved the situation from the artists perspective?

by fkyoureadthedoc

4/25/2025 at 2:41:07 PM

The only thing that matters is ridiculing people who think typing something into a text entry field and receiving a shitty image in return is art.

edit: now that I think about it, a public performance where an artist generates "algorithmically created images" in real-time and they and the audience bask in the shit would be fantastic! Maybe coupled with some shitty AI music, narrated in that shitty Attenborough rip-off AI voice.

It could be called "requiem for a techbro".

by os2warpman

4/24/2025 at 11:52:19 PM

Lol dude reddit has been heavily manipulated since like 2013, if not earlier.

I was heavily involved in buying/selling spam accounts for years on reddit. If you think it wasn't heavily manipulated, at least the frontpage, then lol you were buying it like everyone else.

by chneu

4/24/2025 at 7:53:36 PM

> banning Twitter

This is just practical given you can't see tweet threads (and sometimes even tweets) without an account.

> against banning AI Art

I think you mean to say reddit is pro-banning AI art?

Anyway, banning AI art is absolutely good for curating quality posts. AI art is incredibly low-effort, easily spammable, and has legitimate morality concerns among artist communities (the kind that post high quality content). Same goes for obviously AI-written posts.

I agree content quality on the site has fallen drastically, but those are both measures to try and save it.

by dmonitor

4/24/2025 at 7:06:14 PM

For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good, which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also been ranking them more politically center than most social media sites, although I suppose that's subjective

by guywithahat

4/24/2025 at 8:51:15 PM

I like the community notes as a concept, but they're often a day late and a dollar short. By the time the community note appears the post has been squeezed of all of its juice and was already on the way out. It's better than nothing, but the entire mechanism runs slower than the speed of propaganda.

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 8:54:55 PM

They also don't seem to last. I don't know quite how it happens but you see a lot of these community notes disappear 24 hours after they appeared. They act on the tail end of the posts exposure and then are removed for the long term for when the news comes along and uses it as a reference. But all the people who spotted the misinformation see the post and the community note and so everyone walks away "happy".

by PaulKeeble

4/25/2025 at 12:10:06 AM

While I agree, they still notify everyone who liked it of the community note, so there is some feedback after the fact.

by guywithahat

4/24/2025 at 9:40:59 PM

This. It's technically a solution but not a solution at all. It's like giving a calorie count AFTER someone's eaten a meal (or in this case after the tweet has been viewed by the majority of people that are going to view it).

by _DeadFred_

4/24/2025 at 7:21:11 PM

Reddit has stickied posts at the top of each thread. Well-moderated subreddits use them to great effect. Badly moderated subreddits just shadowban everything that doesn’t match with the mods’ politics.

by jimbob45

4/24/2025 at 7:07:28 PM

tik tok recently added Footnotes

by tough

4/24/2025 at 7:34:20 PM

And Mark pushed it through for FB and IG, at the same time he wound down the Fact Check system (which only hit like 0.0001% of contentious posts). Liberals reacted very negatively to this change.

by kridsdale3

4/24/2025 at 6:56:04 PM

The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.

by ty6853

4/24/2025 at 7:33:11 PM

After the election, the amount of [Removed by Reddit] went from very little, to EVERYWHERE.

That's what did it for me, zero Reddit unless I can't find the information anywhere else, and even then it's for viewing a single post and then I'm gone.

by meroes

4/24/2025 at 7:04:05 PM

In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.

by cmdli

4/24/2025 at 7:07:45 PM

Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.

by ty6853

4/24/2025 at 7:15:43 PM

The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President.

The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been impossible.

by krapp

4/24/2025 at 8:17:50 PM

Harris was pretty much the only option. The primary was already over and there were real questions on who could spend campaign funds with Biden's step down.

That said, I really blame her lose on her and the biden campaign more than anything. They chased hard for disaffected republican voters at the expense of the base. They failed to win those voters and lost some of their base voters.

by cogman10

4/24/2025 at 7:17:35 PM

'Disappeared' of course means that they were banned.

by like_any_other

4/24/2025 at 7:16:27 PM

Ive noticed very clearly a material change even on this site, where a comment with a conservative viewpoint would get downvoted into oblivion, and now I seem to see far more diversified opinions. Which is great, I want that.

by ethagknight

4/24/2025 at 7:19:53 PM

That's bizarre. Putting her at the top of the ticket was very clearly the better of two bad options (it was too late for the better options, by the time the call was made).

There exist people who think Biden had a better shot and replacing him with Harris was a mistake? Did they not look at his approval ratings earlier that year, then look up what that's historically meant for presidential re-elections? Dude was gonna lose, and by the time of the replacement he was likely gonna get crushed. The replacement probably helped down-ballot races, given how badly Bien was likely to perform, so was a good idea even though she lost.

Like, yes, it was per se bad but people blaming that for the defeat is... confusing to me.

by alabastervlog

4/24/2025 at 9:19:34 PM

No I don't think people are saying Biden was the better option. At first, as I recall, people were fairly outraged that they were left with two bad options.

The general tone very quickly shifted to Kamala's brat summer, Kamala is bae type shit.

Even after the fact nobody was questioning Kamala's qualifications. Why, at the 11th hour, were we left with demented grandpa and someone that couldn't win a primary the first time? Whose fault was this? What consequence did they suffer?

The dialogue was mostly around trying to figure out who to blame for people not voting for Kamala. Men? Black dudes? Mexicans? Misogynists? Anyone but whoever was actually responsible for the situation? Idk what it's like now though, I haven't used Reddit in months.

by fkyoureadthedoc

4/25/2025 at 2:59:30 AM

Yes parts of the older working class Midwest would have supported him but didn't support Harris.

by agensaequivocum

4/24/2025 at 7:56:05 PM

That's just hindsight being 20:20

by dmonitor

4/24/2025 at 11:05:53 PM

This slightly speaks to what subreddits a person reads, because I can tell you I had the exact opposite experience. People seemed still very pissed off about it.

by Klonoar

4/24/2025 at 7:28:44 PM

Was just gonna say this. Reddit is dreadful. Anything remotely contentious has a single narrative, and if people try to present any alternative perspective, comments get locked. Disagreement = "hate".

by raffraffraff

4/24/2025 at 7:25:59 PM

Reddit is SO MUCH WORSE than most people understand. Ignoring for a moment that peoples frontpage Best sort uses engagement metrics rather than upvote/downvotes since 2021, the moderators there have an iron grip over what is allowed.

r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period.

Of course, reddit couldn't allow this level of scrutiny, so they banned that subreddit for unstated reasons, and now the only good google result for it actually leads back here. See for yourself how bad it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282

That only goes to two years ago. It feels like it's gotten even worse since then. That's not even going into some subreddits (worldnews, politics, etc.) creating the illusion of consensus by banning anyone with an opinion outside of a narrow range of allowed ones.

by viccis

4/24/2025 at 8:57:22 PM

> r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period.

Is this "mods run amok" or is it the bots gaming the algorithm more effectively and now account for nearly half of all new popular content?

In general my advice to anyone considering Reddit is to start with the default list of subreddits that you get when not logged in. Delete all of those from your list, and track down the small subreddits that interest you. The defaults are all owned by professional influence peddlers now, and what little actual content seeps through is not worth the effort to filter out.

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 10:03:34 PM

In the past I would spot check them and there were plenty of submissions that were neither bot submitted nor obviously rule breaking that were deleted. My best guess was that mods of sufficiently large subreddits just like to shape the content that's shown. In most places, there seems to neither be the power user nepotism of late-era Digg nor the Eastern Germany level narrative censorship of subs like worldnews. Rather it just seems like a ton of cooks in the kitchen (huge modlists) with some of the mods seeming to just take action for action's sake. Either way the point is that users aren't really dictating the content.

Don't even get me started about local city subreddit busybody moderators with their online fiefdoms and their "Daily Discussion" post graveyards.

by viccis

4/24/2025 at 11:38:21 PM

All politics are local, which is a damn shame because the smaller the constituency the worst the politics are.

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 7:59:14 PM

This would be such an interesting experiment to perform on other social platforms as well alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced.

I already got quite a lot of the data pipeline setup for this, so if anyone wants to collab hit me up!

by omneity

4/24/2025 at 9:57:32 PM

>alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced

You'd have to find somewhere on reddit that wasn't 100% deleted haha

by viccis

4/24/2025 at 7:00:35 PM

> The worst by far is Reddit

The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.

by richwater

4/24/2025 at 7:06:55 PM

The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building consensus.

There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualities x, y, and z". Then a third user says "Oh my Ketl Mountain™ travel pants have those exact traits!" Taken on their own the threads look fairly legit and get a lot of engagement and upvotes from organic users (maybe after some bot upvoted to prime the pump)

Then if you dump the comments of those users and track what subreddits they've interacted on, they've had convos following the same patterns about boots in BuyItForLife, Bidets in r/Bidets, GaN USB chargers in USBCHardware, face wash in r/30PlusSkincare, headphones, etc. You can build a whole graph of shilling accounts pushing a handful of products.

by adeeds

4/24/2025 at 7:32:31 PM

The worst part is that in a lot of niche communities knowing the "best" brand for a given activity then becomes a shibboleth, so it really only takes a few strategic instances of planting these seed crystals for the group opinion to be completely captured, and reinforced with minimal intervention.

by tengbretson

4/24/2025 at 7:57:55 PM

How is that not treated as fraud? As you pointed out, with a little bit of detective work (which is well beyond the means and motivation of a casual internet user, but well within reach of a consumer protection agency) it's fairly easy to expose these manipulative tactics. Commercial communication ought to be clearly labelled as such.

by thmsths

4/24/2025 at 9:07:01 PM

Because the cyberspace was lawless for far too long. Justice systems worldwide were too ill-equipped to handle anything involving computers logically, effectively nullifying broad ranges of laws.

by numpad0

4/24/2025 at 9:04:30 PM

I think it is fraud but

a) Is the current FTC going to care?

b) The tricky part is probably proving a business relationship. Otherwise someone could be a jerk and start shilling for their competitors just to get them fined.

by adeeds

4/24/2025 at 7:21:15 PM

This had been as true when I joined ~15 years ago as it has been true on the day they made me quit cold turkey when they took the API away.

by baq

4/24/2025 at 7:03:46 PM

It's great for web searches for answers to very specific questions. "search term" + "reddit" typically gives me a good starting point if not the answer itself to the odd question I have.

by RankingMember

4/24/2025 at 7:32:10 PM

I detest having to keep an account, but unfortunately there a bunch of different products that use it as a semi-official support forum.

by raffraffraff

4/24/2025 at 7:10:30 PM

And use old, the only interface not designed with the tiktok brain in mind

(and the mobile app is just atrocious, RIF was way better in usability, etc)

by raverbashing

4/24/2025 at 11:07:57 PM

It’s clear they know outright removal of it would kill off a portion of the user base, so they’ll just kill it piecemeal - starting with the old messages system and forcing people into the newer chat system.

by Klonoar

4/25/2025 at 9:58:16 AM

True, who tf cares about these new reddit "notifications" hey, 10 people spammed your inbox and you can't mark them as read.

Thanks but no thanks.

by raverbashing

4/24/2025 at 7:04:55 PM

Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be encountered on any such platform. yes Reddit is horrible, but I would say Wikipedia is even more dangerous because it presents as basic facts. Reddit at least you know it's some obscene username giving geopolitical strategy rants.

Important to note, I first saw this specific chart and claim of Musk's heavy handed influence via X. Also, I see plenty of dissenting opinions (in a general sense on Trump, Tariffs, Musk, DOGE, etc) on X. Alternative views definitely have reach.

Also important to note, my posts, where I am very knowledgeable in my domain and will spend an unreasonable amount of time authoring posts to make various points, will garner mere double digit views, so when someone cries about no longer have millions of views for their uneducated hot takes... spare the tears.

by ethagknight

4/24/2025 at 7:16:33 PM

Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"?

> Alternative views definitely have reach.

Yes, but are we in a 1984 situation where that reach is managed behind the scenes. Reach, but perhaps not too much reach. With respect to the chart, how do we know that Twitter users are not largely partitioned? How representative is the fact you saw something compared to other "communities" on X?

All the while, even if you saw a 'dissenting' chart, the fact the chart exists is direct evidence to the power of a subtle shadow-ban effect. It's not about tears and whining, it's that a single act by 'powerful' accounts can control who gets visibility, and who does not. The point is that it is not you, the community that controls what is popular, but it is the powerful accounts that do. That is the issue.

by seadan83

4/24/2025 at 7:25:46 PM

> Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"?

Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue if they were just paying the news agencies to report whatever they want.

Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS' government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or relatively (to the rest of their funding).

by alabastervlog

4/24/2025 at 7:34:41 PM

I get and agree that 'super accounts' like Musk or Taylor Swift or Barack Obama can have an outsized impact that is too powerful.

Strongly argue that TODAY has far more diversity of thought being communicated on various media than 2024. Disagree on being "in 1984 situation," the whole "Biden is sharp as a tack" -> replaced without primary "Campaign of Joy" is as 1984 is you can get. Very clear evidence of syndication occurring across various news outlets, and those syndicated stories don't happen for free. The hard evidence you request is thoroughly concealed and hard to follow as it gets washed through non profits and NGOs. USASpending shows $2mm direct in 2024 to NYT as an example, but it's no stretch to assert indirect sources as well.

by ethagknight

4/24/2025 at 7:48:39 PM

Reddit mgmt itself has significant concerns, according to anonymous sources. You heard it here first.

by the_optimist

4/24/2025 at 7:31:47 PM

> Outside of PBS

How much influence do you imagine PBS wields and how much money do you suppose is in these vast sums they are paid?

PBS is mostly known for Sesame Street and nature documentaries. Their government funding has been whittled down to almost nothing over years of relentless attack from the Republicans.

Here's some discussion from PBS itself on the topic:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-p...

A pull quote:

"The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year."

by DFHippie

4/24/2025 at 9:01:56 PM

> News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story.

In the US it is not the government paying these sums, it is the billionaires who bought the media outlets. When you look for editorial bias in the US it's not pro-government, it's pro-wealth. Or more specifically pro-wealthy people.

> I would say Wikipedia is even more dangerous because it presents as basic facts.

Can you give some examples of political bias in Wikipedia articles?

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 7:20:11 PM

Musk didn't just put a thumb on the scale in favor of far-right content, he sat his entire pre-ozempic ass on the scale.

by smallmancontrov

4/24/2025 at 7:35:04 PM

I deleted my Reddit account years ago because of echo chamber effect and other people intentionally using that to direct opinion. In all fairness though there is an inherent narcissistic incentive to influence popular opinion irrespective of evidence or consequences. This will continue to be true so long as people rely upon social acceptance as a form of currency.

by austin-cheney

4/24/2025 at 6:37:51 PM

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

by gruez

4/24/2025 at 7:08:41 PM

EM directly manipulates the algorithm to suit his interests. Here’s one we know about: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...

by janalsncm

4/24/2025 at 7:59:50 PM

This article does not offer any proof. It's hearsay, from the title saying he "reportedly" forced it, in turn citing a Platformer article that itself also provides no proof and instead accepts the stories from fired engineers as gospel. The platformer article then goes on to say that views still fluctuate wildly, and that it isn't in line with a supposed 1000x boost. The same Platformer article then says that they believe the supposed 1000x boost is no longer in effect, but they guess something else must be in place. The Guardian article doesn't bother to mention that part.

by ruleryak

4/24/2025 at 9:37:46 PM

> This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by Platformer.

I think you might want to check the article again. The interviews were not just based on fired engineers. EM did fire one engineer after he told Musk that interest in Musk was declining.

by janalsncm

4/24/2025 at 9:01:39 PM

Agree about meat, however, the article still made me think.

> What people see feels organic. In reality, they’re engaging with what’s already been filtered, ranked, and surfaced. Naturally, I— and I think many humans have this too- often perceive comments/content that I see as a backscatter of organic content reflecting some sort of consensus. Thousands of people replying the same thing surely gives me the impression of consensus. Obviously, this is not necessarily the truth (and it may be far from it even). However, it remains interesting, because since more people may perceive it as such, it may become consensus after all regardless.

Ultimately, I think it’s good to be reminded about the fact that it’s still algorithmic knobs at play here. Even if that’s something that is not news.

by hashstring

4/25/2025 at 5:02:51 PM

really appreciate the constructive criticism — you're totally right, i should’ve highlighted the sources more clearly.

there were three main pieces of actual evidence i leaned on:

1. the nytimes story on account silencing, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...

2. the visible boost of low-value tweets (though i should have connected to the x api hose and quantify the data),

3. this paper — https://github.com/timothyjgraham/AlgorithmicBiasX/blob/3f4c...

which actually didn’t make it to the the post because the essay was basically finished by the time i remembered i had it. I should have included it. it shows an algo change that boosts elon’s reach specifically.

every other source was speculative:

superbowl fiasko - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk... - little evidence

elon forced 100 engineers to boost his tweets ? - hearsay

there are also supposed whistle blowers - https://substack.com/@theconcernedbird/p-154577954 - but again. no evidence.

And the algorithm is still closed source.

i’m sorry the writing beyond the graph didn’t land for you.

mr gruez - I'll do better next time.

-- the author

by cogitovirus

4/24/2025 at 7:59:08 PM

They are upvoting because they hate Elon Musk. It's not that deep.

by Fidelix

4/25/2025 at 12:16:04 PM

[dead]

by computerthings

4/24/2025 at 7:36:49 PM

Is the title ironic? Is this helping?

"Manufacturing consent", the book by Chomsky and Herman, details techniques that are largely unused in this situation. Chomsky's book by disclosing the hidden editor works against the effect rather than for it.

Here it's closer to a state-run media outlet, with the exact ambiguity that implies: a known editor pretending to be objective, except here the editor only really cares about certain topics, and others are encouraged to roam freely (if traceably).

In Chomsky's case, the editor's power comes from being covert, but only if people are fooled, so the book works to diminish it. In this case, the power comes from the editor being known unstoppable. You have to accept it and know yourself as accepting it -- which means you have to buy in as a fan to avoid seeing yourself as herded, or out yourself as an outsider. Since most people take the default step of doing nothing, they get accumulating evidence of themselves as herded or a fan. It's a forcing function (like "you're with us or against us") that conditions acceptance rather than manufacturing consent.

In this case, articles (showing what happens when you oppose the editor) and ensuing discussions like this (ending in no-action) have the reinforcing effect of empowering the editor, and increase the self-censuring effects. They contribute to the aim and effect of conditioning acceptance. So they might not be helpful. (Better would be the abandonment of a platform when it fails to fulfill fairness claims, but that's hard to engineer.)

by w10-1

4/25/2025 at 4:50:31 PM

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

by notfed

4/24/2025 at 6:26:03 PM

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

by MaxPock

4/24/2025 at 7:32:02 PM

I went back recently. Maybe I'm in the wrong circles, but I'm seeing neither of these.

I _am_ still seeing lots of recycled content looking for clicks.

by sojsurf

4/24/2025 at 7:30:35 PM

It never really stopped. All of Elon's crying about bots stopped as soon as he took ownership.

by stetrain

4/24/2025 at 6:34:32 PM

It's really degenerated into a trash heap. I quit years ago.

by josefritzishere

4/24/2025 at 6:47:32 PM

I pop in from time to time but I only ever see right-wing rage bait (??) and my old timeline is completely gone. I don't engage with any of it either, just scrolling until I finally catch a name I recognize and maybe dropping a like.

by mmastrac

4/25/2025 at 1:17:14 AM

And even on tweets that don't seem to be outwardly ragebait the top replies will always be from blue checked right wing accounts, of course.

by Shekelphile

4/24/2025 at 7:04:17 PM

There's also left-wing rage bait if you scroll down.

It's sad that these social media companies supplanted proper journalism, only to then rot into this.

What do we have now?

by FredPret

4/24/2025 at 6:47:02 PM

Hey, that's not fair! It's also full of porn bots and Holocaust denial.

by arrowsmith

4/24/2025 at 6:59:53 PM

Don't forget the graphic fight videos with comments full of racial undertones. I have literally never engaged with nor watched more than a few seconds of those types of videos yet my feed is full of them.

by jjeaff

4/24/2025 at 7:36:18 PM

It's to radicalize people into becoming racists.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

4/24/2025 at 7:08:43 PM

Ah yes the "look at what brown people are doing to our cities" accounts... One of the main reasons I am not on there anymore.

by vvpan

4/24/2025 at 7:03:09 PM

Every platform has Holocaust denial because that's the one thing that the far-left and far-right both agree on...

by dismalaf

4/24/2025 at 7:04:28 PM

The far-left denies the Holocaust? On what grounds?

by RankingMember

4/24/2025 at 7:30:44 PM

Yeah, am damn far left by US standards, keep up with actually-left sources like The Nation and Democracy Now! (I also listen to right wing nut job AM radio in the car, because I'm a masochist and a politics nerd in general—I'm "fair and balanced"!). Was involved in some left-of-Democrats political organizing in college.

I can't recall ever seeing holocaust denial from that side. I'm sure examples can be found, but I don't think it's a staple there like it is when you veer even a little off the (formerly...) best-trod paths on the right.

by alabastervlog

4/24/2025 at 9:05:42 PM

Typically this means someone who claims that Israel's policies towards the Palestinian population is causing a humanitarian crisis that is counterproductive to long term stability in the region is labeled as anti Jew and a Holocaust denier.

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 7:09:12 PM

It's usually some mental gymnastics related to Israel, Gaza, etc... Because many Muslims deny the holocaust, much of the far-left has co-opted that rhetoric. It's super visible on TikTok, for example.

Edit - some comments below this seem to doubt. Just go on TikTok to politically charged posts about Palestine. This whole thread is about social media. Not holocaust denial on the mainstream left, specifically the far-left on social media

by dismalaf

4/24/2025 at 7:19:24 PM

Sounds like sampling bias TBH. The 'far-left' and the 'twitter-left' (or the tik-tok left) are not all quite the same thing either. I don't think you can draw much conclusions about people outside of a platform based on either Twitter or TikTok.

by seadan83

4/24/2025 at 7:27:42 PM

I’ve seen a lot of anti-Israel stuff but I’ve never seen holocaust denial on the far left. What I have seen is an assertion that the holocaust is one of many horrendous genocides that continue to this day, and comparisons between early holocaust actions by nazi germany (ghettos, destruction of the ghettos, resettlement, etc) against the Jews and Israel in Gaza. Personally I think it’s all absurd. The holocaust is uniquely horrific, and every horrific thing doesn’t have to be comparable or have parallels to be horrible. In fact each genocide is its own unique horror, be it in Armenia, Cambodia, etc. Israel and Gaza is also its own situation and the relationships to the holocaust is irrelevant other than in the space of fallacy. The comparison helps no one - left, right, Jew, Palestinian. Every tragedy is its own tragedy and can and should be examined in itself for the lessons they teach, and anyone who uses violence at scale is wrong no matter what happened prior. Perpetuation of industrialized horrors should shame everyone as human beings. But, I was raised Quaker, and we’ve always been persecuted in some way for believing and standing up for the fact you shouldn’t hurt others.

by fnordpiglet

4/24/2025 at 7:24:21 PM

In my many decades as a political observer I have never seen Holocaust denial on the left. I guess it's a pretty niche sub-movement. Where does one pick these nuts?

by DFHippie

4/26/2025 at 11:42:44 AM

USSR practiced a milder form of Holocaust denial by downplaying the fact that victims were killed because they were Jews. A typical manifestation of that was various monuments to Holocaust victims, the signs of which referred to them strictly as "Soviet citizens" without any mention of their ethnicity.

https://www.blavatnikarchive.org/story/forgotten-remembered

by int_19h

4/25/2025 at 12:23:15 PM

[dead]

by computerthings

4/24/2025 at 7:34:56 PM

He fixed the bot problem, the problem of Twitter banning Elon's bots.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

4/24/2025 at 7:53:56 PM

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

by 627467

4/24/2025 at 7:57:31 PM

But there is no denying that there is a shift in narrative in X posts since its acquisition. So there is certainly more going on than just planetary scale. It was planetary scale before acquisition too. Algorithms have the power to nudge the narrative one way or another at planetary scale.

by throwaway7783

4/24/2025 at 8:21:55 PM

It was completely transparent and unbiased before its acquisition.

by ljsprague

4/24/2025 at 8:33:05 PM

I can't quite tell if this is sarcasm :). I'll assume it is.

by throwaway7783

4/24/2025 at 8:31:48 PM

It was a little right wing biased. Now the bias moved a lot to the right.

by watwut

4/24/2025 at 8:01:07 PM

Yes, the natural order (that was mass censored for 10+ years) got uncensored. Look at who won the presidency.

by EcommerceFlow

4/24/2025 at 8:04:23 PM

No way of telling one way or another, no? Unless you actually work at X and know exactly how it works.

Note - My original comment was not about whether now is worse than before or vice versa. It is just that narratives shifted in a different way, that had nothing to do with scale. Algorithms are just as likely as uncensored (or censored - how does one know?)

by throwaway7783

4/24/2025 at 7:59:25 PM

[dead]

by Swoerd

4/24/2025 at 6:38:25 PM

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

by qnleigh

4/24/2025 at 7:02:44 PM

> Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works?

Funnily enough we should know that, since Elon promised to open source the algorithm in the name of transparency. But what actually happened is they dropped a one-time snapshot onto GitHub two years ago, never updated it, and never acknowledged it again. Many such cases.

by jsheard

4/24/2025 at 9:08:23 PM

It was enough info that people who professionally post on X/Twitter can play the algorithm like a fiddle. They can get anything they want to the top, and often can even get Elon to re-tweet it.

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 9:04:26 PM

Yes, this 100%.

And never forgot the, isElon boolean var that would increase post visibility. lol, what a shame.

by hashstring

4/24/2025 at 6:50:01 PM

Below the chart there's a link to a NYTimes article it was sourced from, which has more plots of more instances of this

by a2128

4/24/2025 at 6:50:23 PM

Their “for you” feed is engagement bait. In other words, it appears to be running almost entirely on CTR. It seems to pull from a pool of posts that are engaged with by those you follow. Limit seems to be 24h.

It’s not a very sophisticated algorithm, likely because the best people aren’t super keen on working there for WLB reasons.

by janalsncm

4/24/2025 at 6:35:00 PM

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

by fouc

4/24/2025 at 6:58:04 PM

I think it's fundamentally different in HN, everyone sees the same posts/comments (Barring settings / mod privileges), but in X everyone can get a slightly tailored feed

by joseda-hg

4/24/2025 at 7:36:21 PM

I'm sure there's coordinated efforts to up/downvote content on HN. The political articles are way up and certain reasonable comments seem to be unreasonably downvoted. It seems like it's ramped up since the election. Either that or HN is becoming a natural echo chamber, I'm not quite sure.

If people don't already know, the internet is easily manipulated and people tend to get ideas and reassurances of ideas based on what their group's opinions are, and those opinions are manipulated. It's easy to create multiple accounts, easy to change IP addresses, easy to bot comments; anyone can do it and it's easy to automate.

The earliest example I can recall was manipulating the Amazon ratings system, now it's everywhere.

by Clubber

4/24/2025 at 7:03:44 PM

"The Algorithm" on most social media platforms to which people apply that term is, crucially, personalized, and (usually) heavily driven by engagement metrics. That's what makes them dangerous and shitty, not just having a voting system or sorting by latest post ("technically an algorithm!" as some posters will helpfully point out in these kinds of discussions)

by alabastervlog

4/24/2025 at 7:20:07 PM

Is it that transparent? I did not know about the vast majority of the items on this list until I encountered it: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

by Philpax

4/24/2025 at 7:45:18 PM

Certainly more transparent than some black box machine learning monstrosity.

by _Algernon_

4/24/2025 at 7:35:48 PM

[dead]

by johntitorjr

4/24/2025 at 7:37:56 PM

I'd like HN to indicate somewhere on the page when mods override flags or make other moderation decisions.

They won't because it would reveal moderation biases and trends.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

4/24/2025 at 7:04:34 PM

on hn the algorithm boosts/hides posts and comments based on the popularity of the user account that upvoted/downvoted? i thought all accounts had the same voting weight.

by kuschkufan

4/24/2025 at 7:30:48 PM

You even even downvote on HN until you pass some bar

by bikezen

4/24/2025 at 8:08:50 PM

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

by mcintyre1994

4/24/2025 at 8:17:04 PM

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

by numpad0

4/24/2025 at 8:39:04 PM

In this modern era we heave under the weight of decades of exponential growth. In some cases it’s actually “only” compound growth - but the result has been the same (and very ironic): ossification through stratification.

There are behemoths living among us. There will soon be social media accounts with enough sway to manufacture truth.

What needs to be learned is society is like a national park. Left to its own devices it will end up trashed - people leave garbage, move in and use it for whatever they like. So, we fund a service that keeps parks maintained. We understand the benefits of the National Park Service because they are visible and we are visual creatures. But for some reason we have a more laissez-faire attitude to unchecked accumulation and its downstream effects.

It’s risky for power to be so concentrated. We’re forced to hope for benevolence and there’s no backup plan.

What more can be done to show the orders of magnitude of difference between the most and least powerful?

by cadamsdotcom

4/24/2025 at 6:51:54 PM

> Social proof used to reflect crowd wisdom. Now it reflects algorithmic endorsement — triggered not by consensus, but by proximity to influence. A single interaction can distort scale, making selected content appear widely supported.

I think this is barking up the right tree with the wrong lesson - these things are the same. Elon Musk, for worse mostly, is a social influencer. You can tell because a lot of people follow him. I am sure the algorithm in unreasonably kind to him (as he can write it) but it's also true that a lot of people care what he does and what he does changes what people care about.

The real question here, to me, is: does this kind of mass social calculus make any kind of real sense? Can we actually extend the idea of interest to 219,000,000 people or do we leave the coordinate system at some point? I suspect it doesn't hold up.

I am a long time believer in the need for good algorithmic filtering. There is more happening in the world than I have attention for and I want a machine to help me. Most solutions are quite bad because they are focused on how much money they can make instead of how much they can help. But I think it's a real problem and the bad, money-grubbing algorithms that surround us now are making our lives much worse.

Ultimately I think this comes back to operationalizing human relationships. What does it math for Musk to have that many followers? This is distasteful but real, I fear, in the age we live. Social influence is clearly real and we are measuring it in flawed ways and we should try and improve those flawed measurements.

by aeturnum

4/24/2025 at 7:24:31 PM

> What does it math

This is a super interesting way of looking at it.

The math works because of the two-party system.

American politics due to the two-party system is fundamentally dishonest. Issues are packaged across parties and you have to buy everything the party is selling. For example there's probably lots of Republicans that would not mind decently run government-subsidized healthcare and there's lots of Democrats that think the government should respect their right to be armed. But because the parties don't really support these positions, it creates significant pressure for people outside of the party buckets to twist their public political talk. Fundamentally this makes political talk and political social media activity dishonest as well. When owners of social networks become political figures, it basically turns all coefficients in this equation to exponents.

by RiverCrochet

4/24/2025 at 7:02:59 PM

Jake Paul is a social influencer. His posts show up from organic engagement.

Elon Musk owns the platform. He directly dictates how it works. He ordered engineers to boost his posts by a factor of 1000.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

Whether some people like EM’s posts is beside the point. It’s manufactured.

by janalsncm

4/24/2025 at 7:44:49 PM

Elon Musk had 85 million followers in 2022[1] before he acquired Twitter. He obviously has some organic engagement / grassroots appeal, separate from whatever benefits he derives from owning the platform.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Elon-Musk

by derektank

4/24/2025 at 6:41:09 PM

The low effort boosting replies are what get me. A lot of tech billionaires (who supposedly work harder than any mortal) spend a ton of time with one word / emoji replies.

At least this is visible boosting. The next step is to boost behind the scenes, entirely unauditable. All of the power (and more) of an editor, none of the accountability.

by janalsncm

4/24/2025 at 7:07:33 PM

The "author_is_elon" flag in Twitter's source code comes to mind

by RankingMember

4/24/2025 at 9:02:51 PM

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

by hammock

4/24/2025 at 7:39:58 PM

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

by Synaesthesia

4/24/2025 at 10:04:49 PM

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

Any links greatly appreciated.

by -__---____-ZXyw

4/24/2025 at 7:04:35 PM

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

by hadrien01

4/24/2025 at 8:13:59 PM

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

by jadbox

4/24/2025 at 8:16:11 PM

> When an account with 219 million followers interacts with a smaller one — not by blocking or arguing, but simply by muting — the consequences are immediate. The smaller account’s visibility drops from 150,000 views to 20,000 overnight.

Is this true on Twitter/X?

If so, what is the rationale?

by neilv

4/25/2025 at 1:23:17 AM

There were more than a few cases at the time around acquisition where Musk publicly got into autistic manbaby slapfights with people on twitter and ended up banning them publicly. Presumably he is choosing to avoid doing this to mask what is happening to the victim and to avoid more bad press about it - it directly harms his thinly veiled persona as a free speech absolutist.

by Shekelphile

4/24/2025 at 8:25:34 PM

Lots of people report those kinds of massive deboosting and visibility penalties, and constantly devising avoidance strategies. There are no trivially inferred rationale as with lots of things going on in the world, unless destruction of value were the goal.

by numpad0

4/24/2025 at 7:08:16 PM

Wouldn't that random tweet about the tariff pause that caused a market crash be an outlier if not proof this isn't always true?

Random obscure account tweets about a 90 day pause...a few people talk about it....and suddenly news outlets ran with it and the markets freaked out.

by tonetegeatinst

4/24/2025 at 6:41:29 PM

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

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

by riffic

4/24/2025 at 6:49:13 PM

Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a governance structure that made it immune to such an attack…

by sorcerer-mar

4/24/2025 at 7:00:28 PM

Also, have the key "public utility" factors changed? Do politicians and journalists still get their news/engagement there?

Honestly asking. For me, a former "public utility" poster, it seemed like the public square for elite opinion and that was what made it a utility. I don't think anyone was saying we need public utility microblogging in general.

by woooooo

4/24/2025 at 7:03:35 PM

I think it's in reference to pre-internet 1A 'protection' even when using publicly available private property.

>See Marsh v. Alabama for this -- a company town was prohibited from barring picketing and pamphleting on private sidewalks. [user?id=rabite]

>https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/326us501

by ty6853

4/24/2025 at 7:05:06 PM

Ah, good point. Very possible!

by sorcerer-mar

4/24/2025 at 6:50:37 PM

poorly thought out aspirations then.

Many of the communication outlets through this utility have as well their own web infrastructure, hopefully serving as a single source of truth, whether that looks like wsj.com or whitehouse.gov. Interestingly enough the W3C has a recommendation to publish activities through an interoperable manner. There's even talk of putting the Bluesky protocol through whatever process the IETF uses to create a request for comments.

by riffic

4/24/2025 at 6:58:39 PM

It’s “poorly thought out” to want there to exist truly public infrastructure that’s of the rough shape of Twitter?

I personally would love not having every viable tool of propaganda owned by private interests totally free of any Constitutional obligations.

A public utility Twitter would surely be inferior in many ways, but IMO would be a useful counterbalance to have in the mix of platform options.

Your comment makes sense if the social value of Twitter was exclusively posting links from other actual sources of truth, but it’s not. That’s not even the primary source of social value in a free society (it’s the dialogue).

by sorcerer-mar

4/24/2025 at 8:28:19 PM

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

by jhp123

4/24/2025 at 10:31:23 PM

MeowMeowBeenz or Nosedive, in real world

by hamilyon2

4/25/2025 at 7:24:25 PM

i think it is the same with reddit

by Avlin67

4/24/2025 at 7:58:47 PM

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

by ein0p

4/24/2025 at 6:54:02 PM

Genuine social interaction is not profitable.

Trying to achieve this on a for profit platform is pure folly.

These are time wasting machines and were never truly capable of being more than that particularly once their use base reached a size where monthly churn no longer impacts the bottom line of advertising revenue.

by timewizard

4/24/2025 at 8:00:45 PM

Spend a decade crying wolf or "muh fascists" at every little thing we disagree with, and suddenly everyone is surprised when the public tunes it out and we get fascists.

"who made you this way?"

"you did."

- american politics circa 2025

by o1inventor

4/24/2025 at 8:42:12 PM

I mean, the fascists today are basically the same people as the fascists 10 years ago. It wasn't crying wolf, it was seeing what was going to happen in the future.

by piperswe

4/24/2025 at 7:13:59 PM

Interesting

by bromuk

4/24/2025 at 7:35:24 PM

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

by renewiltord

4/24/2025 at 6:45:41 PM

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet.

Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

by arrowsmith

4/24/2025 at 7:41:33 PM

> Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

Right. Did everyone forget about the twitter files already?

by jsbg

4/24/2025 at 6:51:47 PM

HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central.

BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.

by trollied

4/24/2025 at 6:53:32 PM

If twitter is “central”, what on gods earth do you consider “right of center”?

by selectodude

4/24/2025 at 7:31:29 PM

X users say that the content they see is roughly equally likely to be liberal or conservative: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/06/12/how-x-users-... (look at the chart: Political content users see on X)

by rayiner

4/25/2025 at 1:26:56 AM

This was last June. As of March 2024 Musk was still saying he wouldn't donate to either candidate.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-says-he-wont-donate-ei...

and it wasn't until July that Elon made himself a liar and endorsed/funded Trump. Not sure how relevant your link is in light of Elon effectively going back on everything he said/committed to previously and buying the Presidency.

by _DeadFred_

4/24/2025 at 7:28:33 PM

4chan or any of the chans, or the site the /r/the_donald folks moved to after reddit banned it? Or Voat, but that's gone now?

by dpedu

4/24/2025 at 8:58:32 PM

That's what my liberal friends told me from 2017 to approximately the day Musk bought Twitter: "They're private companies, bro, they can do what they want. Just don't use them if you don't like it." They never said that before 2017, and they've stopped saying it now. Welcome back to the "censorship is bad" side, I guess; just don't tell me it was ever about a principle.

by aaronbaugher

4/25/2025 at 8:05:29 PM

The difference is that "liberals" never even attempted to censor conservatives. Rather, what happens is that conservatives pretty much can't articulate their views without employing slurs. And, well, that gets you censored.

The reality is that if I talk like Kamala at work then nobody gives a flying fuck. If I talk like Trump, I'm going straight to HR.

It's not that conservative voices are incapable of being rational or are being purposefully targeted or anything. It's that American conservatives are far-right populists so of course their messaging follows that notion. They appeal to emotion, they berate, they gloom and doom, and they have very Nazi-like rhetoric just by their nature. That's how populist messaging works - it wouldn't be populism if you weren't trying to convince people that monsters are coming to eat their babies or something.

Point being, yes conservatives are obviously targeted more by censorship. It can be very easily avoided by not lying, not saying slurs, not calling for the decimation of peoples, etc.

Our own President cannot meet that standard. So, predictably, outrage populists on places like Twitter certainly cannot. It seems to be that conservatives have no voice of reason, no person to look up to.

by const_cast

4/25/2025 at 5:49:30 AM

Exactly.

by arrowsmith

4/24/2025 at 6:58:25 PM

> BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.

It would be nice if this were true, but I did an experiment where I created a new account on a VM with a new IP not previously connected to me and it almost immediately started serving me right wing slop regardless of who I followed. It seems obvious to me from this anecdote that it’s not as simple as following or unfollowing.

by MOARDONGZPLZ

4/24/2025 at 9:03:19 PM

My exact experience. I spent months trimming my follow list down from hundreds to about 25 very carefully selected people and blocking and muting words and accounts, all trying to make my feed about the people I followed instead of what ever the so-called influencers and Musk toadies were peddling. It didn't help much so I created a brand new account from an email address on a different domain using a different web browser on a different machine and the content was no different except that new account also got and about a dozen Tesla sycophants occupying every 4th or 5th post in the feed. So, new accounts get all the same garbage as old accounts with the added benefit of a bunch of Tesla simp pseudo-ads.

by asadotzler

4/24/2025 at 7:01:27 PM

Really? Crikey. I am happy to be wrong.

by trollied

4/24/2025 at 7:24:37 PM

Idk about the author but I don’t even think it’s a problem. It’s just Elon Musk’s website. It is as important as readers of it want it to be. As someone else said, expecting real social interaction or authenticity on a for-profit website is folly. Of course at best it’ll be optimized for clickbait/rage bait etc, and in practice probably that plus the pure bias of whoever controls it.

If people want to post their ideas on the internet, they can do so on their own websites for nearly nothing. Getting someone to listen to you? That’s much more expensive… everyone who’s been used to getting that free from social media should consider that it used to be much harder to get attention for one’s ideas, which used to be assumed to be uninteresting by default.

by xp84

4/24/2025 at 6:59:07 PM

People don't want neutrality and even-handedness. They used to think that they did, but at some point in my lifetime they stopped lying to themselves.

by dec0dedab0de

4/24/2025 at 6:55:30 PM

If your complaint is that the right-wing lies of the laptop story weren’t amplified, then you desire propaganda to be spread. We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.

by miltonlost

4/24/2025 at 7:01:05 PM

I thought the entire story was suppressed at the request of a government agency, not just specific opinions about it.

by dec0dedab0de

4/24/2025 at 7:33:15 PM

Unconsensually shared graphic images of Hunter Biden were removed, there were lots of people covering the laptop story, mostly about how it was a non-story when looking at the actual chain of custody and its contents.

by bikezen

4/25/2025 at 4:37:40 PM

> We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.

Does that include the lie that the story was "Russian propaganda"?

by jsbg

4/24/2025 at 7:50:32 PM

Every social media platform is manipulated by it's owners and elites. There's no way to get around it, not when your KPIs are user engagement and advertising dollars.

Twitter has become a particularly nasty version of it. In the before times, Google, Twitter, Reddit, etc. usually spent their efforts trying to manipulate things in a mostly benign way.

If you like free markets, then you must be opposed to Twitter. This is a market controlled by a few. Competition is rigorously hunted down. Lies and fake social proof packaged into "free speech." Only the chosen ones are allowed audience.

This is the opposite of capitalism. This is the worst of cronyism.

Force switching all accounts to unfollow Democracts and follow Republicans and Elon, signal boosting right wing conspiracy theorists, blocking or suspending left or liberal accounts, it's just naked power centralization all the way down...

by Joking_Phantom

4/24/2025 at 7:47:16 PM

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

by whalesalad

4/24/2025 at 9:14:05 PM

What is most amazing it to see what Elon retweets, often with just a single word followup. It's the most batshit stuff you've ever seen. Or just blatantly obvious propaganda. And people call him a genius. It's like the world is bowing down at the altar of your drunkest most racist uncle.

by jandrese

4/24/2025 at 10:06:37 PM

Have you seen "his" leaked 4chan account? Most insane shit I have ever read in my life. Here is a mirror ... the poster says multiple times that they are the owner of twitter. https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/tripcode/%21SATANZ0Gpo...

Along with many other things like heil hitler. Assuming this is actually his account, he is 100% a nazi.

by whalesalad

4/24/2025 at 7:57:10 PM

Metrics on X have lost all of their credibility since Elon took over.

The guy likely juices his own numbers, floods posts he likes with botted engagement, etc.

Likes are private so he can delude Trumpers into thinking they're popular in a sea of bots.

by gmd63

4/24/2025 at 7:45:28 PM

[dead]

by languid-photic

4/24/2025 at 7:14:44 PM

[dead]

by wetpaws

4/24/2025 at 7:01:14 PM

X is a cult. People I know are being totally brainwashed.

There so much misinformation, fabrication and half truths out there. Repeateted over and over again in various forms.

When the full story surfaces two days later, they'll never see that on their cult hub.

by devrandoom

4/24/2025 at 7:42:55 PM

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

by torlok

4/24/2025 at 6:39:56 PM

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

by a_c