Want to hear something interesting? Anything Twitter-related these days is interesting, especially given how much Twitter has been spiraling into the abyss since Elon Musk became the new CEO. Anyway, the main news today is when Musk himself replied to a commentator who questioned why he was seeing more ‘right-wing’ posts in his feed.

Politically Correct

This isn’t a definitive policy change or update that Musk is enforcing, but it does imply that Twitter is looking to show people more opposing political commentary in their Tweet Feeds in order to raise awareness and engagement. Musk also pinned his tweet reply mentioned above, lending more weight to the suggestion.

This is interesting because various studies have shown that this approach just doesn’t work. Back in 2020, Meta executive Andrew Bosworth published a long-form blog post about the challenges of political polarization on social networks and their experiences at Facebook in tackling such. Bosworth explained that while they had tried to show users more content from both sides of the political spectrum, the user response had been the opposite of what was intended.

Within this, Bosworth essentially acknowledges that Facebook usage has indeed amplified political division, though not in the way that many expect, which is by showing you more and more posts that align with your established beliefs. Bosworth says that Facebook users actually ended up seeing a lot more opposing viewpoints, which only exacerbated political divides, because these posts drove more angst and further embedded opposition, as opposed to broadening people’s perspectives.

True enough, that same year, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that:

“People are less likely to click on things and engage with them if they don’t agree with them. So, I don’t know how to solve that problem. That’s not a technology problem as much as it is a human affirmation problem.”

Shortly after, Meta announced that it would reduce the amount of political content in user feeds in 2021. People were simply getting sick of all the angst and bickering on Facebook, which was causing them to log in less and less, prompting Meta to reduce such content, in favor of more enjoyable experiences. In more recent reports, Zuckerberg even directed his engineering teams to effectively cut political content from people’s News Feeds altogether, which Facebook users also disliked.

All-in-all, Meta chose to scale back the amount of political content it showed people. It did this by a lot, but not totally, which may, as mentioned by Musk, ‘keep users in their echo chamber.’ On Twitter, this would likely drive users to switch to the ‘Following’ Feed instead of the ‘For You’ one, which includes recommended Tweets chosen by Twitter’s systems. If Musk and his team are pushing for more politics into this stream, then it might not turn out exactly as they hope.

The Wrap

What does Elon hope to achieve with such a move? Is it all part of his grand plan to brand Twitter as the haven of “free speech,” or does he simply want to promote his own opinions and get more people to agree with him? Honestly, it’s hard to say. However, in essence, it also seems to make sense, at least from an ideological perspective. In reality, though, it just doesn’t work. Still, Musk has never been the one to listen, has he? Maybe it’ll work on Twitter, or maybe it won’t. Let’s allow him to have his way and find out.

Sources

http://bit.ly/3ZJU01g