I’ve noticed that since the 2024 US elections, more and more of you have asked me if I have joined a social media network other than Xitter, and 99% of the time, you’ve asked specifically if I’m on Bluesky. So today I thought we’d talk a little bit about social media and algorithms, and I also figured I’d start by saying that yes, you can find me on the following social media networks where I post more or less depending on what I feel like doing:
@actuallyrebeccawatson on Threads and Instagram and TikTok
And of course you can always find my posts and videos at skepchick.org and patreon.com/rebecca. Oh and as I mentioned in the previous video, I have a Discord you can join. It’s fun!
So there have been a few recent news stories about social media. First, last week I watched a John Oliver piece on the US ban of TikTok. There wasn’t much in there that I didn’t talk about in this video I made back in April–the jist of it is that yes, it’s possible that Chinese authorities could pressure ByteDance to share information they collect about Americans via TikTok, but US companies are already collecting way more data about Americans and sharing it with data brokers who will happily sell it onward to whatever government wants it.
The only real update to add is that since my video, the law did pass–you know, I’m starting to think that our Congressional representatives value Mark Zuckerberg’s opinion over mine–and so the TikTok ban is still looming, with the company currently suing to stay in business without selling to a good wholesome American company who will also mine our data for evil purposes. But in an American way.
One thing I learned from the John Oliver clip is that apparently Trump went on TikTok and promised users that he would fight to protect the app if they voted for him, but, well, come on. I think we can put that in the “he was probably lying” bucket. But who knows? Every day is a brand new reality.
Anyway, I was glad that Oliver talked about this and correctly brought up the behavior of American companies in comparison to TikTok. And it just so happens that a relevant new preprint has dropped from analysts at Queensland University of Technology: A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election.
To highlight, this is a preprint, meaning it has not been peer-reviewed. It may be that this analysis is flawed. If you’d like to check it out for yourself, the entire preprint is available online. As always, links to everything I talk about in every video are found in the transcript on my patreon, which is linked in the description box below.
Anyway. This paper is about the potential manipulation of the algorithm employed by Xitter, which is also known variously as “X” or “Twitter.” It’s the social media network that used to be fun and full of scientists and journalists sharing interesting things, and then Elon Musk bought it to stop people making fun of him so much, and now he’s “First Buddy” to President-elect Donald Trump. Cool!
These researchers conducted two phases. In phase 1, they only looked at Elon Musk’s posts in 2024 and how people were interacting with them through views, likes, and retweets. They found that things were pretty steady from January until July, but specifically on July 13th, they observed a major shift. Musk’s posts’ views suddenly jumped by 138.27%, retweets jumped 237.94%, and likes jumped by….(hi, post-production Rebecca here. While filming, I realized I’d put the wrong percentage in my script and figured I’d correct it in post. But here I am editing and imagine my surprise when I doublechecked the paper and realized THE AUTHORS made the mistake, repeating the results from the retweets in the spot where the likes should be.
Mistakes like this happen in preprints, but it just goes to show you that you REALLY have to take a grain of salt for papers that haven’t been through peer review yet. That said, while I’m here I also wanted to mention that this study’s results do match what a Washington Post investigation found last month. Okay, back to the video!)
In phase 2, they compared five popular conservative accounts (like LibsofTikTok and Ben Shapiro) to five popular liberal accounts (like AOC and Kamala Harris) over the course of the year. They once again found that around July 13th, the Republican accounts (but not the Democrats) showed a significant boost in views, though there wasn’t much of a difference between retweets and likes.
The authors suggest that this is strong evidence that on July 13th, Elon Musk or his team adjusted the algorithm to promote his own posts, and additional evidence to suggest that the algorithm was adjusted to show more rightwing accounts on the “For You” page, which shows users posts from across the network and not just who they chose to follow.
So what happened on July 13th? Well, a few things. The researchers note that that’s the day that Musk officially and publicly endorsed Donald Trump for president. Seeing that Musk is now in an incredibly powerful position in the Trump administration, it sure looks like he made a bet that paid off.
There’s one major issue I have with this paper, though: July 13th was also the day that someone tried and failed to assassinate Donald Trump. For the first time. That we know of.
The researchers DID compare Musk’s engagement to that of other users on the platform, and it was a significant difference, so assuming their statistical analysis is correct, I do think they have good evidence that he manipulated things to promote his own posts. But I also think that it’s a little weird to not even mention the attempted assassination that same day, which would surely drive people, especially conservatives, to Xitter to interact with media that reinforces what they want to hear. Personally, I think this conclusion would be stronger if the researchers made it clear that they took that into consideration and attempted to control for it somehow.
I mention this criticism in part because I think that people, myself included, sometimes rue the All-Knowing Algorithm a little too much. Do these social media networks have the ability to manipulate people’s thoughts and actions? Absolutely. Is it the only factor in the spread of misinformation and extremism? Absolutely not. People also make choices, and are also influenced by the things happening in their real lives.
Still, I do think that at the very least we can say, yes, Musk probably boosted his own posts, and yes, that probably did help spread more misinformation and pro-Trump propaganda since that’s what Musk posts, almost exclusively now.
Does this mean you should leave Xitter? A lot of people will insist that if you stay there you’re contributing to Musk’s fiefdom, and they have a point. But as I said, a LOT of you were specifically asking if I’d left Xitter for Bluesky. And because of that, I feel the need to tell you that this is quite literally history repeating itself.
Let me be clear: I enjoy Bluesky! A lot of old pals are there, and I have entire feeds of different kinds of scientists, and it genuinely feels like Twitter, BM. I mean…Before Musk. I guess Twitter After Musk could also be known as BM Twitter.
Anyway. Bluesky is yet another closed platform run by a company. Just like Twitter, and Facebook, and TikTok, users of the platform are entirely beholden to that company to not fuck things up. You see, before social media we had a beautiful thing called RSS. A person could start a blog for very cheap or even for free, where they could post whatever they wanted. And then you would get to plug their RSS address into a feed, and it was kind of like early Twitter: posts in order from every person you wanted to read! Their blog posts or artwork or podcasts, listed in the order they posted or you could put them in little categories.
But the difference is that there was no one controlling the “platform.” The “platform” was your own making.
This style of “consuming content” died thanks to several issues: for one, an engineer at Google managed to make an RSS feed reader that everyone LOVED, named, appropriately, Google Reader. It even let you follow other Reader users to see what they were liking and sharing and it ruled. But as with every successful product Google creates or purchases, they shut it down. In 2013, they said that though there was a loyal crowd of users, the numbers were declining so bye bye.
Why were numbers declining? Simple: in 2012, Facebook went public and ended the year with a BILLION active users per month. By 2013, Twitter had more than 200 million active users. Unlike the independent web of blogs and RSS, social media networks were incentivized to keep users on the platform, so they rewarded users for posting thoughts, images, and videos right there on the platform. They changed the way people “consumed content” (that used to be called “reading” or “listening” or “watching”), and tanked the popularity of blogs and RSS.
To be fair, it’s not too confusing as to why: RSS required a tiny bit more knowledge (though in the later years, Google Reader made it VERY easy to even get feeds from sites that didn’t even publish an RSS). Facebook just required an email address. And once you were on there, everything looked the same and just showed up in your feed and it was very easy to share and like and comment. Sure, Facebook also lied constantly–I’m sorry, “miscalculated”–about their metrics in order to fully kill off print journalism, but at the same time, they and Twitter created walled gardens that people wanted to be in.
But as Cory Doctorow recently pointed out on his Medium (because independent blogs don’t really exist anymore), the problem was that once you’re in that garden, the owner can do whatever they want and you have to decide if it’s worth leaving or not. For many of us, it just isn’t. My blog was doing just fine for a decade, but then I realized that I had to build up a following on Twitter to remain relevant. So I did. And now that it’s full of Nazis, I need to just hope that people will see my Bluesky username and move over there. Where there are fewer Nazis. For now.
But this year, BlueSky took $15 millions in venture capital from a company called (I shit you not) Blockchain Capital. BlueSky rushed to reassure users that they aren’t doing any blockchain shit but that’s not actually my concern! My concern is that venture capital ruins everything. It’s even ruining my primary income source at Patreon, where they couldn’t just be satisfied running a profitable business that makes creators some money. Venture capital means that you now need to increase profits more and more and more, often at the expense of the people who rely upon your service.
Cory points out that it isn’t the VC that means things are going to go downhill, but the leverage the network has over users who can’t leave the platform without a significant downside.
Me? I say it’s both. But to be fair, Cory is smarter than me so take that with a grain of salt.
I do agree with his conclusion, though: if you want to join a social network without repeating Twitter-to-Xitter history–the Xistory, if you will–you need to join one that puts the onus on the owner to provide a good service, and that allows users to pick up and move elsewhere with little to no downside. And that, as of right now, is the Fediverse. That’s the social media network founded by and focused on Britney Spears’ ex, Kevin Federline.
Wait, no, sorry, the fediverse is a collection of social networks that share a protocol, which allows for independence while at the same time facilitating communication between them. The closest thing to Twitter related to the fediverse is Mastodon, where you can pick one of many servers and set up an account and start building your feed. Each server has different rules and standards, and if one pisses you off you can take all your followers, all the people you’ve followed, and all your posts, and quickly and easily jump to another server. Therefore, the servers have an incentive to moderate the way their users want, or else the users will just go elsewhere.
All that said, I honestly don’t know if Mastodon, or any other similar network that prioritizes individuality, will ever be able to compete with something like Twitter, or Facebook, or Bluesky, which I should note has the potential to join the fediverse but hasn’t taken any steps to do so. Mastodon is just a little bit confusing, and there are just a few too many options, compared to the ease of signing up for one account at one URL and being given recommendations of who to follow and whatnot. And that’s why I’m on several sites: I actually do like the look and feel of Bluesky over the client I pay for to use Mastodon (Ivory), and Bluesky does feel more comfortable to me. But I’ve seen this happen over and over and over again: the more aesthetic, more comfortable option turns out to be a gilded cage.
It’s all fun and games until the guy who runs your preferred social media site is using that same site to elect a fascist.
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