Gregory's ServerThe new stuff in the Twitter algorithm is wild.
"author_is_elon", "author_is_republican", "author_is_democrat", etc., are explicit terms that are special cased.
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5 comments
Like, how do you think ranking works? There are models/weights that determine a tweet's ranks that haven't been released and we know, e.g., Elon tweets, are now extremely highly weighted. The NYT reported that Elon tweets have 1000x weight and the fatigue filter is disabled, but let's say their sources are wrong and there is no explicit special casing in ranking. It's still the case that people report seeing way more Elon than before. How do you think this metrics data is being used? @danluu I'm not sure but it feels like collecting this information and labelling users like this would breach GDPR? Political affiliation comes under special category data - you have to have a damn good reason to collect - let alone be using it in this way. I know GDPR only applies to EU citizens (and the UK for now) but we don't know how they're labelling users with this do we? @danluu I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he planted these values there just to get to be the good guy and remove them. He already said expect it to be “embarrassing,” and seriously who names a metric “author_is_republican” |
I'm a bit surprised at how many "well, actually, these are just metrics" replies I'm getting that seem to find the spirit of this comment plausible after (just for example), Elon asked why his engagement was dropping and then fired Twitter's most senior remaining engineer for telling him it's not a bug, which was followed by people seeing a lot more Elon in their feed and people also report seeing way more Republican stuff in their feed.