The news comes as questions were forwarded to Twitter chief Elon Musk’s direction from users. They appeared to be curious about why they were being shown more right-wing posts across news feeds and that’s when Musk spilled the beans.
He also said that those supporting the left-wing parties would be shown more right-wing posts and vice versa. And we’re not quite sure if users would agree to this and that’s why Musk says they always have the option to block in case it becomes too bothersome.
It’s not a definitive change in policy for now and not a new update being reinforced. But by the looks of it, this might be a hint that more diverse techniques are being used to enhance awareness and engagement through such politically themed means. The tweet was similarly pinned and it just goes to show a little weight being added to such suggestions.
But studies from the past continue to show how such approaches don’t really work. For instance, in 2020, we saw the likes of one of Meta’s executives produce a long post on a great many challenges linked to political polarization across different social media apps and the types of experiences being dealt with on the app in dealing with such endeavors.
Bossworth mentioned how users were shown content from two different sides of the political spectrum but the results received were the clear opposite of those intended. Very few people were reading newspapers and they wanted to get as far away from this type of theme as possible. But to slam it right back into their faces through the likes of Twitter isn’t necessarily going to make them fall in love with politics or force them to emphasize it either. In fact, as pointed out by Bossworth, you start to dislike it even more.
After such news broke out, Meta opted to limit this sort of content that was politically themed on its users’ news feeds and they were pretty content with that. One major type of feedback that Meta spoke about regarding its users is how they wished to reduce political content on the app and that happened to be in favor of gaining more enjoyable experiences.
This is probably why Zuckerberg was seen directing engineering teams to cut out political content from people’s news feeds as a whole and some didn’t quite love that. So now, Meta has opted to scale back on the likes of politics but is yet to eliminate it as a whole.
Musk may be risking another major development and warding off users as a whole with such behavior. It’s an experiment and most people aren’t huge fans of it, at all and which means they’re going to be using the social media app even less now.
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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World
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