Twitter's Algorithm: Amplifying Anger, Animosity, and Affective Polarization

by abhi9u • 3 years ago

106 109 3 years ago

asim5• 3 years ago

I hate social media with a passion. In 2000 using msn, yahoo messenger and chat rooms was a joy. Browsing the web was such fun, exploring and finding new information and websites.

In 2005 MySpace became all the rage and something shifted. It was the start of the "me" generation. Facebook amplified this and it became all the rage to ask "are you on Facebook?" at parties. Everything was new and exciting but we also had no idea what we were about to get into. The feed became an addictive creation that twitter then took to some next level. The "For you" tab is a joke. It's a way to continue to drive clicks, likes, retweets. All of this needs to end now. I honestly don't have the answer but I know part of it is probably less technology, less staring at screens and almost zero social media consumption. I so badly want to escape.

lynx239• 3 years ago

Well, quit, and be done with it. The problem with addicts is that some of them somehow think it is the responsibility of the society to outlaw whatever they are addicted to. Nope. The "me" generation tells you: get your act together and stop making others responsible for your decisions.

CalRobert• 3 years ago

Sadly we've enfeebled the other options. Not being on social (at least the messaging platforms) media makes it tough to maintain social relationships. It can be done, of course, but with friction. It's also how a lot of orgs communicate with the world, annoyingly.

blrwxt• 3 years ago

Gamification, group think, mob voting and censoring dissenters exist in other areas that you cannot escape. GitHub is an example.

Mobile service providers outsourced their customer "service" to open forums.

Mailing lists have been replaced by "Discourse" or unsearchable Telegram and Gitter channels. Nothing has a history any longer.

coldtea8• 3 years ago

The problem with addicts is that some of them somehow think it is the responsibility of the society to outlaw whatever they are addicted to. Nope.

On the other hand, the problem is with "everyone for themselves" solutions is that they're not enough to address an issue that affects you (and society in general in systemic ways) even if you personaly don't use the medium.

edgyquant• 3 years ago

That’s fine when it’s a minority issue, when it affects everyone it IS societies responsibility to fix it. That’s the kind of stiff society exists for

haunter• 3 years ago

The "For you" tab is a joke
I so badly want to escape.

Then why do you click on it? I like Twitter still because I just see what I follow and that's all.

kjeksfjes• 3 years ago

Exactly. While my usage of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook is somewhat sporadic, often with months in between, I find they serve their purpose well when needed. I've seen some toxicity on Twitter, it's not pervasive enough that I can't ignore it. As for Facebook, I predominantly use it as a tool for staying informed about my connections, checking their updates and occasionally even ensuring their well-being.

I fail to see how an absolute withdrawal from social media has benefits over trying to manage and cultivate a more mindful approach.

seanhunter3• 3 years ago

I honestly don't have the answer

1) Delete your facebook account. It takes a month (because they don't let you delete immediately) but you won't miss it.

2) Leave twitter.

I believe social media is a net negative for society so I did the above. You can take responsibility for your own situation and do the same.

asim5• 3 years ago

I don't have Facebook. That went like 10 years ago. I still have twitter but deleted an account with 3k followers and returned to follow just the things I care about quietly. Still that scrolling behaviour gets me. My consumption is drastically lower than it was but at the same time I think it can be better and part of that is reframing how we get the information we're consuming on social media.

dbspin4• 3 years ago

That's not a good solution for most people.

Twitter I can delete. I don't browse facebook, I try not to browse instagram - but these platform's messaging facilities, along with whatsapp, google chat, signal, telegram and more are used daily by my friends and family to communicate.

Sure you can simply cut off those who don't use your preferred platform. But I've seen what happens to people who do that - when the first facebook backlash occurred back in the late 2000s. They disappear from the real world 'social graph' of their non-local friends.

Of course it would be better if everyone used one, encrypted messaging app. But thats not likely to happen any time soon. Of course social media is a poison, as OP pointed out. But its utility for low effort passive relationship maintenance with my old friends from college, jobs, school etc is an essential part of my social life. I suspect thats true for millions of people.

falsandtru• 3 years ago

"For you" tab of GitHub is a worst. GitHub has been forced and withdrawn it repeatedly and is still waiting for an opportunity to force it. Eventually GitHub will delete the "Following" tab and force the "For you" tab again.

asim5• 3 years ago

Tbh it's about as useful as the trending page is. Which is not very useful. These things could be so much better but GitHub is just copycatting at this point. It used to be a leader in great UX.

surgical_fire• 3 years ago

I so badly want to escape.

Why do you keep using it then?

It's an honest question. I tried using Facebook many years ago, but I found it extremely boring, and only served for me to dismay at what some people I respect posted online. So I abandoned it, didn't even bother deleting my account. I just never went back there.

I never even created a Twitter account. Only time I ever browse it is when someone sends me a link to something there. I look at it and leave. I always thought the idea and implementation was repulsive.

I am always puzzled why people use those sites. Doubly so when they voice displeasure at doing so, such as yourself.

mfru• 3 years ago

because it is addictive.

i only quit because i got banned without reason and got auto-rejected when appealing.

koonsolo2• 3 years ago

Check out Discord. All the social media that you mention are all about "look at me", with a competition of getting the most likes and comments.

Discord is basically small independent servers, where discussions and information primes over users. If you have some toxic people, they just get kicked out.

I run a server with a bit more than 1000 members, most of them teenagers. I'm always surprised how nice and friendly they are to other strangers on the net.

asim5• 3 years ago

I think discord works well but at the same time isn't for my generation. I was reluctant to adopt slack and used it for work/oss community building but found it just wasn't a fit for me. I'm still someone who enjoys email and async comms. I also prefer conversating in small groups. So having this kind of fixed limit feels right. Like 20 people or less. Totally private.

I also don't really want to talk to strangers. I'd like it to be network driven starting with real people I know or have met IRL.

SirMaster• 3 years ago

In 2000 using msn, yahoo messenger and chat rooms was a joy.

I dunno, Discord seems like this still to me now.

beej71• 3 years ago

I'm sure there's no one size that fits all, but we've replaced it with small groups.

For example, my family is in a discord channel. My SO's family is in a group text. My local motorcycle buddies are in a group text. My college friends from way back are on Slack. My expat coworkers from my last job are on Slack. My high school pals I'm still in touch with are on Discord.

And I get feed news on Mastodon, which is non-algorithmic. And it's great.

I still have accounts on those other sites for DM purposes, but I've deleted most of my past content and the rest is inoffensive stuff parked there just in case someone looks for a job or something.

I definitely miss out on the day-to-day of a lot of people I know, and that's a loss. But I still feel I have a net gain for my own mental health.

Again, this is only what works for me. YMMV.

asim5• 3 years ago

This. So you're highlighting what I feel and see. The need to manage small groups in a singular way. Maybe that's not even worth it but it's all spread across different platforms. I don't really know if a bridge for them all in one place is useful or whether it's just about having the one place to have these private groups.

seanhunter3• 3 years ago

If you read the "Ranking by Engagement" blog post[1] you can understand why.

Ranking by expected user engagment increases user retention but is negatively related to quality.

[1] https://integrityinstitute.org/blog/ranking-by-engagement

abhi9u• 3 years ago

A thread by one of the authors of the paper, giving an overview: https://twitter.com/SmithaMilli/status/1663222170560999424

bigcat12345678• 3 years ago

Essentially, "Amplifying Anger, Animosity, and Affective Polarization" is to give people more "free expression", right?

neom• 3 years ago

Elon said in a recently interview that his new most important metric is to reduce regret time spent on site. An example he gave is that people should get push notifications about tweets they wouldn't regret clicking.

I don't know how twitter has me profiled, but these days it sends me onlyfans models, Matt Wallace, J.K. Rowling, Ed Krassenstein, Bitcoin influencers as recommended tweets to read.

Funny thing is, I don't follow anyone and nobody follows me, I just have a twitter account to occasionally (once a week?) read what Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and some musicians I like are tweeting about. I'm a liberal leaning centrist, I don't care about American politics much, or bitcoin, or onlyfans... I'm so curious how it decided to start serving me all this content that is so outside of who I am.

Also for those curious, this research is out of Berkeley and Cornell:

Smitha Milli, Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell Tech

Micah Carroll, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

Sashrika Pandey, Undergraduate Researcher, University of California, Berkeley

Yike Wang, Undergraduate Researcher, University of California, Berkeley

Anca Dragan, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

I don't follow anyone and nobody follows me,

This is likely the problem. Social networks seem to put your account in a weird “starter” bucket if you don’t engage with it in the way it expects.

You’re probably getting pushed some weird version of the algorithm that some PM once devised when tasked with getting inactive users or new users engaging better.

actualwitch2• 3 years ago

So because they couldn't decide what to push on this account, they just spam notifications with random stuff? Seems at odds with the outlined goal of "reduce regret time spent on site".

iamflimflam13• 3 years ago

The problem is, what's pushed is not nice pleasant content. It's content that is designed as the original article says, to amplify anger, animosity...

sidibe• 3 years ago

You get the blue checks if you're not following anybody. Same as if you expand any any popular tweet. From what I've seen these are typically angry and weird people

pavlov• 3 years ago

"I don't know how twitter has me profiled, but these days it sends me onlyfans models, Matt Wallace, J.K. Rowling, Ed Krassenstein, Bitcoin influencers as recommended tweets to read."

Sounds like Musk has replaced the personalized recommendation algorithm with "Just recommend Elon's likes to everyone".

It's a joke, but I honestly wouldn't be too surprised if he did something like this. His fallacy as a product thinker is that he imagines everybody wants what he wants.

This works for Tesla which sells essentially a single product (the 3/Y are the same car while S/X sales are a blip). His product intuition for a car has been good. But his intuition for what people want out of Twitter is completely wrong because he doesn't seem to grasp that there are a hundred thousand different Twitters — each country and user group and subculture has their own idea of what it is and how they want to use it.

zirgs• 3 years ago

Seems like that they are throwing the whole political spectrum at you to see what sticks.

cypress663• 3 years ago

Just follow the people you're interested in, instead of hoping the algorithm reads your mind.

nverno• 3 years ago

This is eerily similar to my (short-lived) experience on twitter- same usage (occasionally logging on to read Elon tweets and a few others), exactly the same sorts of recommendations.

Twitter just wasn't entertaining enough for me, if I'm in the mood for that sort of entertainment I'd rather read Hackernews or watch youtube.

meltedcapacitor• 3 years ago

That feed anecdotally looks similar to the accountless (not logged in) feed. Makes sense, "no follows" is pretty similiar to "no account".

BTW accountless twitter got better under Elon: it's now possible to just bookmark one's follows offsite, and poll their page every so often, without as aggressive login walls as under Jack. Also nitter.net seems to have survived the API armageddon quite nicely and is good for accountless twitter with even fewer distractions.

ben_w• 3 years ago

these days it sends me onlyfans models

Multiple onlyfans, or Aella Girl? Because if it's specifically her accounts, the algorithm is probably thinking you're a tech nerd.

ansc• 3 years ago

I really wish there was a... "casual" or "slower" replacement for Twitter. I created a Twitter account and followed my favorites, unfortunately I keep getting "outrage" tweets recommended. Funny, it's like it's own little microsphere where people vent about trans, climate, "men are superior to women", all these 4chan-esque topics. It's not even about about being correct, it's just about short "gotcha!" posts that sound good but are riddled with logical fallacies and ludicrous points if you think about it for a second.

I, on the other hand, go to HN to complain apparently. :-)

once_inc• 3 years ago

nostr is currently very open, happy and accepting. Unfortunately, not many people are there yet, unless your interests contain Bitcoin.

zhte4152• 3 years ago

Holding me back from posting updates of what I had for breakfast is the problem of private key sharing with services that I can use in order to post updates of what I had for breakfast.

A client or service will inevitably be compromised. And with it, the private keys of some, or assumed all, using it, whether stored by the service or logged on entry by a compromised system.

Private keys should be chained, master->subkey, with subkey the public key of the service __or a solution like that or that ends in the same result. When (not if) a service or key is compromised, the key can be blacklisted and/or any key co-signed by a compromised service blacklisted.

I'm confused by the oversight. It's also been raised here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97

Until then, I'll have to keep my updates of what I had for breakfast to myself.

henearkr• 3 years ago

Have you tried Mastodon? It can be literally described as a "casual" and "slower" Twitter.

jruohonen• 3 years ago

The problem with Mastodon viz Twitter is that all the important people, including politicians in particular, are still in the latter, often in order to attack each other on daily basis. I bet some of them actually love the polarizing algorithm as it only benefits them.

rapnie2• 3 years ago

And its very slow growth over many years to 'just' a couple of million users (which growth hacking megaplatform enthusiasts have been deriding it for) contributes to this more healthy culture, imho. Yes, all the usual social dynamics exist that are also present in any other platform. But handled differently, better maybe.

guilamu• 3 years ago

You can disable all recommandations with "Control Panel For Twitter". IMHO, a life saver.

raihansaputra• 3 years ago

It takes a bit of work, honestly. I slowly shifted my timeline from tech/dev centric to a niche that feels comfortable and not outrage-based, but it needs pruning like a garden. The best way is to signal to the algorithm that i'm not interested in certain kinds of tweets when it pops up again. Also try not to open/see the replies of those tweets as viewing it is also a signal. It's a cost/benefit thing, me personally have found a lot of value in keeping adjacent tweets coming to my timeline.

pjc502• 3 years ago

A whole bunch are being launched: spoutible, cohost, etc. Unfortunately "slower" necessarily means "less content".

Dunking was always a part of twitter culture, but it's got far more vicious, unrestrained, and stupid lately.

rpastuszak• 3 years ago

I use RSS and for chatting with people: https://sonnet.io/hi

Twitter/Reddit/HN are too toxic for me to visit every morning, so I started allowing myself to visit these sites 1-2 per week before 5 pm. Evenings are fine as I’m already done with my work.

People are actually kind when you see each other’s faces. It’s bizarre how big the difference is.

cypress663• 3 years ago

Just use the "following" tab. One of the best changes since musk is that now it's a prominent button and it remembers that setting, instead of tricking you into using the algorithm.

iamflimflam13• 3 years ago

Not for me - on the iOS app it will still randomly switch to the "For You".

It worrying how long it takes to realise it's happened. But after reading the several tweets from conspiracy nuts and right wing fruit cakes you notice.

snarkyturtle• 3 years ago

Tumblr. It's much more "empty" and full of niche communities. It'll also add support for ActivityPub so it'll be a decent way to hook into Mastodon servers as well. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-prot...

zhte4152• 3 years ago

Encouragingly, the recently passed EU Digital Services Act (2022) mandates that large online platforms offer a non-algorithmic way of viewing content, such as a reverse-chronological feed [Vincent, 2022]. This development may soon make it possible to replicate our methodology across multiple platforms of interest. We hope our study will inspire future efforts in this direction.

ggm• 3 years ago

Just quit. I did, never regretted it. It's toxic shit, owned by a toxic shit.

trabant00• 3 years ago

Enough outrage against the outrage. If any other content would have worked then media and social media would use it. The algorithms reflect what people spend time on. My recommendations are motorcycles, computers, video games, watches, etc. Still a useless time-sink comprised of mostly thinly veiled advertising but nothing rage inducing.

Nobody else is responsible you click on political stuff. Nobody is responsible you join every moral crusade that gets started. Even on HN where there is no personalized algorithm, even on technical issues, most people vote and comment with their moral/political sensibilities a lot of the time.

So in conclusion it's not them, it you.

jmeister• 3 years ago

I now believe the future will be far more irresponsible and stupid than I once did.
I am increasingly worried that human success and failure are ruled by taste — the demand side, in economic terms.
If there are fewer beautiful and charming residential post-World War II neighborhoods, it is because most people do not want to live in them. If there are fewer movies today with the dramatic impact and compositional rigor of “Citizen Kane,” it is because people do not very much want to see them. It is not that it is too difficult or expensive to make another “Citizen Kane.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-03/are-th...

kthejoker2• 3 years ago

The 3 top grossing films of 1941 the year of Citizen Kane:

* Sergeant York, a superhero war propaganda film

* Honky Tonk, a racy Clark Gable / Lana Turner western

* Louisiana Purchase, a zany Bob Hope musical

For the record, Citizen Kane was a flop, and there were many excellent movies made this year.

This is a bad argument.

yodelshady• 3 years ago

Even without the Algorithm, Twitter would be awful.

Quite simply: when was the last time you went in Twitter to see an intelligent argument that opposes yours? Never, because such a thing simply requires more than 280 characters, and multiple cited sources.

280 chars with a single source is enough for a "look how bad my enemies are" hot take, however.

It's a shame, because getting off social media fully is hard now - so much actual research and professional interaction requires it as well. But eurgh.

cypress663• 3 years ago

Maybe don't use Twitter for politics?

I use Twitter to follow many AI researchers and it's great to keep up with the latest papers and so on.

Also Twitter supports long tweets now, and people have always created threads anyway.

hnbad3• 3 years ago

Having used Twitter threads and a Mastodon instance with a limit of 8000 characters, I have to say that the latter actually makes me less verbose. Due to the per-message character limit and the widespread use of quote-retweeting I felt like I had to make sure every tweet was defensible in isolation so tweet threads just turn into the most mundane one-liners so there's still enough room in each to provide context. Twitter's threading UI also only supports standalone tweet threads and does nothing to help with composing multi-tweet replies so those often go out of order eventually and people will reply to individual tweets rather than the end of each sub-thread.

iamflimflam13• 3 years ago

Exactly this. About a year ago I purged all the political accounts I was following. All it was doing was making me feel angry and helpless.

Now I just follow fellow makers and tech people. Twitter is fun again.

lapcat5• 3 years ago

Quite simply: when was the last time you went in Twitter to see an intelligent argument that opposes yours?

Why would you want to use a social network for this purpose?

If you want an intelligent argument that opposes yours, then read a book. This is a serious suggestion, not sarcasm: books are wonderful!

engineer_22• 3 years ago

-> Quite simply: when was the last time you went in Twitter to see an intelligent argument that opposes yours? Never,

Strange premise. As a Christian I don't head to mosque or synagogue. Similarly, I don't use Twitter in that way

archagon• 3 years ago

I get the sense it’s not really possible to win an argument on public social media. Even if the other person has no rebuttal, they’ll at best slink away and someone else will just take their place. Ad infinitum.

twitts• 3 years ago

All i came across Twitter is trash. It doesn't even load properly on my phone. I would rate it as a piece of shit.

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

This is pretty unsurprising for anyone who has used twitter. The entire way it's set up is that you have clusters of mutual followers who form communities, and they engage in fairly innocuous ways, and then because the site is public-by-default you get inter-group conversations where someone from one of these communities will see something posted by one of the other communities and at this point the two communities go to war. It's like if 1 in every 100 posts on Reddit appeared on a different sub-reddit. Think of the engagement when a /r/conservative post just pops up on /r/politics. Reddit has obviously seen what happens there and has made big moves to stop that happening, but at twitter that's the default way the site works. It's fantastic for engagement and no one at twitter wanted to kill the golden goose.

Having said that, this study is quite unfortunate in its timing - it managed to time it's data collection at the exact point in time where Elon Musk was forcing his employees to manually boost his tweets so that he could get more views than Biden [1]. So basically while the twitter algo had been pretty stable for the last decade they managed to time their data collection over the exact week where the moron decided to start messing with it to stroke his own ego.

[1] https://proofpointisolation.com/browser?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww...

lapcat5• 3 years ago

It's like if 1 in every 100 posts on Reddit appeared on a different sub-reddit.

I like this analogy.

x-complexity• 3 years ago

Breaking away from the anti-social-media consensus that's bubbled up here, I haven't seen any discussion about how much the baser human psyche craves tribalism & self-grouping more than anything else.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.16941.pdf (page 5)

As shown in the paper itself, regardless of the political tribe, there's a persistent positive feeling that comes with reinforcing the viewpoints of the in-group.

(page 4) It should also be noted that the personalized tweets are self-reported to be rated slightly higher than the chronological tweets, with political tweets being the exception. In short, when politics is filtered out, the Algorithm is doing its job well.

1.3 Tweet value to reader
For each tweet, we also have users assess whether they value seeing that tweet or not (“When you use Twitter, do you want to be shown tweets like [@author-handle]’s?”, where users choose between “Yes”, “No”, and “Indifferent”). We find that overall, tweets shown by the algorithm are rated slightly higher (0.05 SD, p = 0.024). Interestingly, however, when restricting to political tweets, those recommended by the personalized algorithm lead to significantly lower user value than those in the chronological timeline (−0.14 SD, p = 0.004).

Dataset-wise, it's heavily skewed towards left-&-far-left Democrats (page 12, Tables 5 & 6), & young people (page 13, Table 4).

Twitter's Algorithm: Amplifying Anger, Animosity, and Affective Polarization

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