For You: The Rise of Right Wing Recommendations
This article was originally set to be published in January of 2023, it covers the new version of the “for you” page that lead to many people experiencing a flurry of far right recommended lists & users.
Over the last week a new update was released to Twitter's algorithm, & the new home page has caused headaches for several users. Elon himself came out & said “Trashing accounts that you hate will cause our algorithm to show you more of those accounts, as it is keying off of your interactions. Basically saying if you love trashing *that* account, then you will probably also love trashing *this* account. Not actually wrong lol.” foolishness aside he is actually wrong, or at least not completely correct. As many of you know your recommendation feed will usually show you topics you follow, accounts you follow, & accounts you commonly *like* but on the other side of that it will also recommend the people who are followed by the accounts you follow, & who they interact with commonly based on your engagement with any particular account that you're following based on your engagement with that account.
So what's changed? Not a whole lot, it's just prioritizing the followings of who you follow & engage (likes & retweets) with most. Is there a way to fix it? Possibly, but it's likely going to take some changes to your Twitter habits in the long term.
If you go to a Twitter page it'll promote pages that are similar to the page you're currently looking at. Looking at the page of Lavern Spicer it will recommend you follow people like; Lauren Boebert, Liz Wheeler, Kyle Rittenhouse. While looking at TizzyEnt’s page will recommend people like; Mueller She Wrote, PoliticsGirl, Mary L Trump. So why is this important? You are who you follow, like, & retweet to Twitter. This is to say that “hate following” accounts has likely corrupted your personal “For You” feed.
I highly recommend going through the accounts you follow to trim out people you exclusively follow to “dunk or thrash” on. In doing so it will limit the engagement for accounts that generally use their platform to spread hate or dogwhistles, while simultaneously helping to correct your feed.
I want to highlight a few people that liberal/leftists follow just to make fun of that users either think are self parody or dumb, & why I think that the solution to issues people are having with their algorithm would be to just ignore, block or mute them.
*Nick Adams, Lavern Spicer, Jesse Kelly DC, Bridget Gabriel* these four users are generally seen as harmless or parody, when in reality they say purposely idiotic statements to force a reaction out of users. Which I'll admit is hard to resist, but this spreads the account gaining them followers because they're “owning the libs” & allows their less subtle dogwhistles or hateful messages to reach a further audience.