Yeah I remember they had something called "Moments" where journalists that had made secret agreements with twitter could ask to have a story injected into the trending feed. Publicly exposed when a Bloomberg Japan writer tweeted that her Moment wasn't working and support wasn't answering her messages. (because Elon fired the whole team that handled those)
So in Elon's defence, I remember reading tweets of his about this and seeing people chat about it as I was salivating at the idea of being able to look at these trending algorithms in full as a programmer. According to him the whole thing is such a mess they are frequently finding broken bits and having to fix them. Situations of people getting shadowbanned etc. were in fact them finding shit the incompetent staff had done back in the day to various accounts.
We know for example now it's a fact that it doesn't even necessarily matter how many followers you have or what sort of engagement you get. Twitter has fucked with individual accounts if they don't like a person or whitelisted people they do. We'd have to get the code in full to really know how it all works so we'll just have to see whether Elon keeps his word and open sources it. To be honest the idea that the twitter trending page is a clusterfuck does not surprise me one big given how often they fuck up the youtube trending pages. I'm giving you all this detail because it seems likely they've done some fucking around with region based stuff as well owing to things like local jurisdiction too.
Running TLDR theory: This is likely something left over from pre-Elon twitter and they've shadowbanned specific 'anti-LGBT' keywords and or flagged accounts as hate speech and Elon hasn't gotten to that yet. It's the code equivalent of them constantly finding unexploded WW2 bombs.
They were caught fucking with the algorithms for political purposes pre-Elon. Who knows what's going on now.
Yeah I remember they had something called "Moments" where journalists that had made secret agreements with twitter could ask to have a story injected into the trending feed. Publicly exposed when a Bloomberg Japan writer tweeted that her Moment wasn't working and support wasn't answering her messages. (because Elon fired the whole team that handled those)
So in Elon's defence, I remember reading tweets of his about this and seeing people chat about it as I was salivating at the idea of being able to look at these trending algorithms in full as a programmer. According to him the whole thing is such a mess they are frequently finding broken bits and having to fix them. Situations of people getting shadowbanned etc. were in fact them finding shit the incompetent staff had done back in the day to various accounts.
We know for example now it's a fact that it doesn't even necessarily matter how many followers you have or what sort of engagement you get. Twitter has fucked with individual accounts if they don't like a person or whitelisted people they do. We'd have to get the code in full to really know how it all works so we'll just have to see whether Elon keeps his word and open sources it. To be honest the idea that the twitter trending page is a clusterfuck does not surprise me one big given how often they fuck up the youtube trending pages. I'm giving you all this detail because it seems likely they've done some fucking around with region based stuff as well owing to things like local jurisdiction too.
Running TLDR theory: This is likely something left over from pre-Elon twitter and they've shadowbanned specific 'anti-LGBT' keywords and or flagged accounts as hate speech and Elon hasn't gotten to that yet. It's the code equivalent of them constantly finding unexploded WW2 bombs.