I am a little bit concerned right now. Last week I created a new Twitter (known as X by few) account. I wanted a new account to be able to interact with people my age who are also in tech. No offense to the people who follow me on main, but I do have issues navigating “cultural“ differences which arise from the generation gap.
Quick disclaimer: I am not here to debate politics or where I sit on the political spectrum. I am phrasing this blogpost to be as respectful of as many political affiliations as possible, and expect that you can extend this courtesy to me in return.
The first thing which greeted me after the formalities of creating the account was a “start following people” page and was the first concerning thing I would encounter. For starters, you cannot skip this page. Second, it appears to only consider which are famous - like in the 10s of millions of followers. Think Musk, Obama, Trump, Ronaldo, Justin Beiber. While it might make sense to rank by follower count (although this opens a new means of exploiting the algorithm) the list appeared to be ranked arbitrarily (or not lol). For some bizarre reason, it was mainly right-wing politicians (or people with such affiliation) being pushed to the top, regardless of follower count. Elon Musk, Trump, and other popular heads of the USA republican sphere were boosted to the top.
Next is the algorithm. In the page where I definitely had to follow people, I followed nobody with a definitive political affiliation and whose accounts never mentioned politics or controversial topics (including sexism, racism, homophobia). My “For You” page was pretty barren at this point, with really generic content from a variety of the top accounts on Twitter.
Now, I didn’t create this new account to watch Ronaldo tweet about his next NFT project, or Justin Beiber tweet about his next song targeted at 14 year olds. I came to follow people in IT, specifically in my age range. I already knew a few from my main account but didn’t follow them because, once again, generational divide with the people I am currently mutuals with. So I went about following them.
I followed around 10 accounts of which 2 are organisations (one being SUSE of course :) ). Out of the remaining 8 accounts, some are women (yay, women in STEM), some are LGBTQ+ (trans people in tech, nothing new there) and all are what I would consider on the left side of the political spectrum. I promise I’m bringing this up for a reason.
With these people I am following, you would think that an algorithm dedicated to “my tastes” would show posts from similar accounts, right?
Wrong. In my week or two on the new account, I have seen (and I am genuinely being objective here) nothing but racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, rape apologia, nazi apologia as the only content on my “For You” page. Add onto that religious supremacy (my god good, yours bad) and anti-science claims.
Regardless of your political stance, if you think the above makes sense to promote disproportionately to a new account, you are fooling yourself that the algorithm is “unbiased”. So yeah, just slightly concerned :P
Following is proof of the above. I endorse none of this, obviously.
