I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard exactly this argument, when complaining about the obvious, overt, outrageous levels of censorship present on Twitter at the moment.
This isn't at all a comment on the content you create, but it's curious to me that you seem to place complete faith in some of these metrics but no faith at all others, even though they are all supplied by the platform that you say has "absolutely nothing legit" about it.
If the system is rigged, why is it rigged in such a way that people can see that it's being rigged when that could easily have been hidden?
To me, it sounds as if the bots or algorithms are running wild or unintelligible! Whatever the case is, it appears X either hasn't got rid of the old system and you may be falling through the cracks!
Complete and utter bollocks. But feel free to believe in Saint Elon, who runs 4 companies while being a master Diablo player, and 24/7 Twitter sh-poster.
Saint Elon, that's a good one. I saw another name for him from CJ Hopkins- The Emperor Elonicus.
It's amazing how those who are enamoured by Musk have to present him as a hero and a saviour. Had a verbal boxing match with a old school friend when I described him as a parasitic neoliberal leech and a scoundrel of the highest order.
Totally agree that Twitter is compromised & more of a front, controlling what can come through
BUT...
All my bookmarks of your incredible content, to help enlighten & persuade the masses *sob*
Agree that it's pointless putting too much energy in the Twitter Beast, but the immese energy that you have put there can still stay, can it not? The beautiful structures of sources & reason that you have compiled, countless screenshots & threads of proof & argument
All a bright beacon to help lead the Lost to truth & freedom
Perhaps could you just leave it there in statue form - to be referenced & revered by us humble hangers on?
In great hope & great gratiude for your amazing work to now!
And after shooting from the hip, then only fully reading your article, I totally agree. F twitter, however it still holds some value, as does the immense energy you put there. I will go & hunt for damning screenshot I was seeking in the Enron Ethics, I see clearly where this is all going, thanks to your stellar work. I would still love the twitter statue though!
the account was restored as all my backups since june were broken. it is proving an issue, however, because i really do want to nuke it out of sheer hatred of that manipulative enterprise.
I delete my social media accounts every now and then and every time I come back the algorithm (unsurprisingly) ends up serving me the same suggestions of people to follow... except for you. You, I have to specifically look up in order to follow. (I once sent you a medical form I got from my son's school in a DM on Twitter back when you were writing about the Digital Health Twin. That was me.).
I know it's frustrating but I hope you don't give up. I think the ethics angle is incredibly important for what's coming and I haven't seen anyone else touch on it.
I share a great deal of sympathy with your issues. There's a trick Twitter really hates though - blocking. You can block the accounts whose Tweets you don't want to see, and whilst people normally reserve it for people they hate, it's actually a time saving tool if you use it to block accounts whose Tweets are usually inane (Elon Musk's, for example). Such a usage infuriated him so much he actually floated the idea of banning blocks.
On the other side of the coin, Twitter suspended my account two days after I had discovered... Twitter were the ones behind the bot accounts! Via the use of alternating public/private settings and whittling down large swathes of bots and eyeballing associations, I managed to bait a lynchpin bot into trying to like/follow my account. They had, reportedly, 1,500 followers, but when I dug into the metrics to see who the followers were, Twitter displayed a 'this person doesn't have any followers yet' page. Meaning the 1,500 figure was fabricated by Twitter themselves.
I highlighted this in a Tweet, not expecting a reaction from Twitter, but 2 days later I found myself suspended from the platform with nary a message explaining why. I later caught wind of a rumour Twitter employees use bots to inflate Elon's like/retweet counts (as nobody was liking his inane bullshit they had to compensate using bots).
In terms of how the platform works behind the scenes, there's three general algorithms at work.
The first algorithm basically promotes anything "popular" (lots of likes/retweets) into your feed. Elon's inane ramblings, political nonsense, the usual.
The second algorithm isn't based on who you follow, but *who you interact with*, and I call it the 'bait-and-switch' algorithm, because Twitter misleads you into thinking you'll see Tweets from people you follow, but you actually get Tweets from people you interact with (specifically, the people you reply to, I.E. all those obnoxious vaccine shill trolls who spam incorrect bullshit day-in, day-out).
The second algorithm has, from what I could gather, several main rules for promoting their BS into your feed:
- You must have like, retweeted, quoted, or replied to their Tweet (replying has the highest weighting, which is why you won't see Tweets from people you like as much as people you hate)
- You must not have blocked them
- The Tweet must not have been reported or gained a negative score
- The account must not be in bad standing (have some magical Twitter restriction)
- The more you reply to the person, the more content from their BS inane feed will be shoved into your feed (a weighing algorithm, basically)
- People they interact with are also fair game (so if vaccine shill you argued with follows another vaccine shill, that other vaccine shill will likely also end up in your feed)
Essentially, it's a controversy promotion algorithm. It conflates angry argument with "engagement" and shoves more into your feed. A dopamine-crack generator.
That is why your feed is mostly celebrities and obscure accounts. Any long Twitter debates, arguments or discussions you had have all populated the feed.
The third algorithm are *promoted* Tweets, but I don't mean the ones clearly marked as advertisement. Twitter appears to have some slimey backhand deals to artificially shove or promote government propaganda into Twitter feeds.
These will be accounts that have no relation to anyone you know, and are not associated with anybody you argued with, and you can usually tell if they are or not, because if you block them, you will find them, mysteriously, many months later, unblocked. A prime example was a fake account pretending to be critical of vaccines asking people for their stories and information (basically, a datamining Tweet artificially promoted into skeptics' feeds; the account had an AI generated image and a fabricated backstory).
Contrast Gab. Their posts are just a randomised flood of posts - no algorithm. If anything Gab has a different problem, in there's no reasonable way to filter for posts you want to see.
As we witness the systematic manipulation of public opinion, with its collateral erasure of dissenting voices, it’s crucial to become critically aware and increasingly vigilant, and possibly even to upskill for mere survival.
This isn't at all a comment on the content you create, but it's curious to me that you seem to place complete faith in some of these metrics but no faith at all others, even though they are all supplied by the platform that you say has "absolutely nothing legit" about it.
If the system is rigged, why is it rigged in such a way that people can see that it's being rigged when that could easily have been hidden?
Your argument is actually somewhat self-defeating, because it essentially boils down to the fraud being even worse than what I detailed.
In this case, my response of deleting my account is even more apt.
To me, it sounds as if the bots or algorithms are running wild or unintelligible! Whatever the case is, it appears X either hasn't got rid of the old system and you may be falling through the cracks!
Complete and utter bollocks. But feel free to believe in Saint Elon, who runs 4 companies while being a master Diablo player, and 24/7 Twitter sh-poster.
Saint Elon, that's a good one. I saw another name for him from CJ Hopkins- The Emperor Elonicus.
It's amazing how those who are enamoured by Musk have to present him as a hero and a saviour. Had a verbal boxing match with a old school friend when I described him as a parasitic neoliberal leech and a scoundrel of the highest order.
Totally agree that Twitter is compromised & more of a front, controlling what can come through
BUT...
All my bookmarks of your incredible content, to help enlighten & persuade the masses *sob*
Agree that it's pointless putting too much energy in the Twitter Beast, but the immese energy that you have put there can still stay, can it not? The beautiful structures of sources & reason that you have compiled, countless screenshots & threads of proof & argument
All a bright beacon to help lead the Lost to truth & freedom
Perhaps could you just leave it there in statue form - to be referenced & revered by us humble hangers on?
In great hope & great gratiude for your amazing work to now!
And after shooting from the hip, then only fully reading your article, I totally agree. F twitter, however it still holds some value, as does the immense energy you put there. I will go & hunt for damning screenshot I was seeking in the Enron Ethics, I see clearly where this is all going, thanks to your stellar work. I would still love the twitter statue though!
the account was restored as all my backups since june were broken. it is proving an issue, however, because i really do want to nuke it out of sheer hatred of that manipulative enterprise.
I delete my social media accounts every now and then and every time I come back the algorithm (unsurprisingly) ends up serving me the same suggestions of people to follow... except for you. You, I have to specifically look up in order to follow. (I once sent you a medical form I got from my son's school in a DM on Twitter back when you were writing about the Digital Health Twin. That was me.).
I know it's frustrating but I hope you don't give up. I think the ethics angle is incredibly important for what's coming and I haven't seen anyone else touch on it.
I share a great deal of sympathy with your issues. There's a trick Twitter really hates though - blocking. You can block the accounts whose Tweets you don't want to see, and whilst people normally reserve it for people they hate, it's actually a time saving tool if you use it to block accounts whose Tweets are usually inane (Elon Musk's, for example). Such a usage infuriated him so much he actually floated the idea of banning blocks.
On the other side of the coin, Twitter suspended my account two days after I had discovered... Twitter were the ones behind the bot accounts! Via the use of alternating public/private settings and whittling down large swathes of bots and eyeballing associations, I managed to bait a lynchpin bot into trying to like/follow my account. They had, reportedly, 1,500 followers, but when I dug into the metrics to see who the followers were, Twitter displayed a 'this person doesn't have any followers yet' page. Meaning the 1,500 figure was fabricated by Twitter themselves.
I highlighted this in a Tweet, not expecting a reaction from Twitter, but 2 days later I found myself suspended from the platform with nary a message explaining why. I later caught wind of a rumour Twitter employees use bots to inflate Elon's like/retweet counts (as nobody was liking his inane bullshit they had to compensate using bots).
In terms of how the platform works behind the scenes, there's three general algorithms at work.
The first algorithm basically promotes anything "popular" (lots of likes/retweets) into your feed. Elon's inane ramblings, political nonsense, the usual.
The second algorithm isn't based on who you follow, but *who you interact with*, and I call it the 'bait-and-switch' algorithm, because Twitter misleads you into thinking you'll see Tweets from people you follow, but you actually get Tweets from people you interact with (specifically, the people you reply to, I.E. all those obnoxious vaccine shill trolls who spam incorrect bullshit day-in, day-out).
The second algorithm has, from what I could gather, several main rules for promoting their BS into your feed:
- You must have like, retweeted, quoted, or replied to their Tweet (replying has the highest weighting, which is why you won't see Tweets from people you like as much as people you hate)
- You must not have blocked them
- The Tweet must not have been reported or gained a negative score
- The account must not be in bad standing (have some magical Twitter restriction)
- The more you reply to the person, the more content from their BS inane feed will be shoved into your feed (a weighing algorithm, basically)
- People they interact with are also fair game (so if vaccine shill you argued with follows another vaccine shill, that other vaccine shill will likely also end up in your feed)
Essentially, it's a controversy promotion algorithm. It conflates angry argument with "engagement" and shoves more into your feed. A dopamine-crack generator.
That is why your feed is mostly celebrities and obscure accounts. Any long Twitter debates, arguments or discussions you had have all populated the feed.
The third algorithm are *promoted* Tweets, but I don't mean the ones clearly marked as advertisement. Twitter appears to have some slimey backhand deals to artificially shove or promote government propaganda into Twitter feeds.
These will be accounts that have no relation to anyone you know, and are not associated with anybody you argued with, and you can usually tell if they are or not, because if you block them, you will find them, mysteriously, many months later, unblocked. A prime example was a fake account pretending to be critical of vaccines asking people for their stories and information (basically, a datamining Tweet artificially promoted into skeptics' feeds; the account had an AI generated image and a fabricated backstory).
Contrast Gab. Their posts are just a randomised flood of posts - no algorithm. If anything Gab has a different problem, in there's no reasonable way to filter for posts you want to see.
As we witness the systematic manipulation of public opinion, with its collateral erasure of dissenting voices, it’s crucial to become critically aware and increasingly vigilant, and possibly even to upskill for mere survival.
https://leadingindicator714285.substack.com/p/censorship-inc?r=4nhb02
Great counterpoint
This is both incredible and not a surprise. Must has turned over operations to the WEF abd what happens?
It's possible your diagnosis is correct - I hope not.
But I also consider the possibility that these metrics are just not that reliable in an environment as dynamic & enormous as X.