everyone involved in the dismantling of USAID should be forced to spend their lives watching graphic videos of what they have subjected people to in their callousness, clockwork orange style
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
If you have the means, please donate to the Trans Continental Pipeline right now. They are a Colorado based org that helps trans people relocate and they are overwhelmed with requests. Colorado borders Kansas, and TCP has the infrastructure to help get people out.
tcpipeline.org
You spend a decade trying to understand the UK’s baffling relationship to class, you think you’ve finally started to get it, then you see something like this and realise you’re right back to square one.
douglas adams was our most accurate futurist
“We interrupt this flight to bring you an unorthodox bus journey”
Oh bless, this has made my Sunday ❤️
He looks as though he's been caught cooking and also as if he mistakenly believes cooking to be illegal
The United States government is retaliating against 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family for having the temerity to challenge their unlawful detention with a habeas petition.
That’s retaliation. This is Kilmar Ábrego García all over again. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...
Definitely alive, even if like me you mostly just lurk
Liam is back home.
He is only one of the approximately 3,800 children in ICE custody.
(Source: www.themarshallproject.org/2026/01/29/i...)
Really cool that while we have a national panic about teenagers on phone too much, phone is also causing pensioners to build car bombs www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com
Makes me suspicious about longevity/long term support for that electric drivetrain. Unless it’s a typo & it was meant to be a £100 discount?
This is one of the strangest and most screwed-up stories I’ve worked on. www.londoncentric.media/p/tiktok-lon...
"How *do* you plan to defend getting rid of the ICEBlock app while allowing X to generate degrading images of a woman ICE killed? Can Apple and Google even identify their values beyond their commitment to ‘shareholder value’? What’s your fucking endgame here, guys?"
I would really caution anyone against implying that paywalling this feature is a legitimate response to public outcry. The paywall is an endorsement, not a restriction. Musk is saying "this thing you're all talking about is valuable. Pay me for it." The actual material effect is just monetization.
Generally you put the hotel (or first hotel in your itinerary) iirc
I know everyone is pointing it out but I do think it is absolutely reckless editorial practice to cite what an AI says, especially in a headline.
Grok has no authority, nor does it have a meaningful explanation for what happened, and citing it obscures those actually responsible for literal crimes.
calmly explaining why we shouldn't bomb random venezuelan boats to people who argued we should torture random iraqis and then won an election by saying they were against a war they advocated for
Great thread and investigation. Exactly what we all assumed: the ‘confidential information’ was wages and work conditions discussed in a worker-only Discord, not leaking anything about the game. Pure union busting.
The fact it doesn’t line up with the slats on the ceiling 😬
Some BBC figures point to an effort to shift the corporation politically, dating back to Boris Johnson’s time in government. The Guardian has been told Prescott’s appointment as an external adviser had been pushed by the BBC board member Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief who helped set up the rightwing broadcaster GB News.
25 paragraphs before the Guardian gets to the truth, which even then it can't bring itself to have a position on (www.theguardian.com/media/2025/n...).
twitter being bought and turned into a propaganda machine for fascism, which is directly pumped into every journalist in the world's brain, is one of the worst things to happen in the last few years. we might not survive it.
What a dystopian quote from Rupert Lowe MP
So retro that people are bringing up Russian bots again as a reason why people are bigoted dickheads as opposed to accepting that polls show that at least 30% of people are just always like this and always will be
I'm so sick of discourse from supposed allies about where trans people went wrong.
Where we "went wrong" is that billionaires spent unimaginably large sums to attack us repeatedly and major media outlets have spent a decade piling on.
1993: Stephen Lawrence is murdered by racists.
1999: The MacPherson Inquiry recommends recording of non-crime hate incidents.
2005: After the Discrimination Law Review, non-crime hate incidents begin being recorded by UK police.
2025: Mainstream transphobia ends a harm reduction policy that worked.
wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...
