It Was Only Business

Twitter has admitted that its algorityms favor right-wing content and right-wing public figures.

This should come as a surprise to no one.  In 2016, the Macedonian sh%$ posters realized very quickly that they could get right-wingers to click through, share their stories, and thud and generate revenue, in a way that the political left would not.

From a business perspective, right wing content creates more user engagement, and hence more opportunities to make money.

Pushing right wing content is more profitable, so that is what they do, which is why we need some sort of regulations.  The magic of the market will not work here:

Twitter is publicly sharing research findings today that show that the platform's algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians and content from right-leaning news outlets more than people and content from the political left.

The research did not identify whether or not the algorithms that run Twitter's Home feed are actually biased toward conservative political content, because the conclusions only show bias in amplification, not what caused it. Rumman Chowdhury, the head of Twitter's machine learning, ethics, transparency and accountability team, called it "the what, not the why" in an interview with Protocol.

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Chowdhury emphasized that Twitter doesn't already know what causes certain content to be amplified. "When algorithms get put out into the world, what happens when people interact with it, we can't model for that. We can't model for how individuals or groups of people will use Twitter, what will happen in the world in a way that will impact how people use Twitter," she said. Twitter algorithms cannot just be opened up and examined for biases, and the home feed isn't run by just one algorithm. It's a system that works together, creating "system-level complexity."

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Facebook has fallen under massive fire for failing to share the findings of its own social media research, revealed over the last month in a series of leaks to the Wall Street Journal. The company has seemed especially frustrated with how media and politicians have interpreted the leaked findings, and has also tried to emphasize the limitations of researchers' work. While they didn't mention Facebook, Chowdhury and her team have gone to great lengths to do the interpreting of the newly published paper themselves.

The right-wing, in the United States at least, has been conditioned to consume the scams of the elites.

If you followed advertisers on the late, and unlamented, Rush Limbaugh's shows, you found gold coin sellers, weight loss scams, foreclosure vultures, mesothelioma scams, and colloidal silver.

Facebook, and Twitter, and the rest of them, have taken to heart Weisshaupt's adage from the comic book Cerebus, "I firmly believe that if you can't fool all of the people all of the time you should start breeding them for stupidity."

Stupid people are good for the business of social media.