Elon is addressing this in the Twitter Space right now. "It definitely shouldn't be dividing people into Republican and Democrats; that makes no sense[...] you've identified something we should be getting rid of right away."
So false equivalence is written into the platform. Insane opinions of one party must be displayed as often as moderate opinions of the other. It definitely works for angering everyone on Twitter, not so much for actual dialog or progress.
The amount of stretches people make in these threads is amusing. There's enough real things to care about, don't need to set completely unrealistic standards you'd never impose on yourself or 99% of others you didn't already despise.
IIRC it was very recent, there was a Twitter engineer that was fired after explaining to Elon that the algorithm was not biased against him: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/10/petulant-elon-musk-fired-tw... Almost certainly after that event Elon had them explicitly bump his tweets in their reach.
That's one possible explanation. If you were implementing that change, would you do it by embedding an "elon" variable in the codebase, or would you make the specific account a parameter?
And Elon later explained that that had nothing to do from him making any specific request that his tweets be valued.
This is largely a false creation without evidence to back it up. People are assuming intention behind something that's much more easily explained as a bug, one that was quickly fixed. If it wasn't a bug, why would it disappear if people assume Elon is narcissistic as people claim? It'd still be prioritizing his tweets if it wasn't a bug.
It's an incredible coincidence that, out of hundreds of millions of accounts, this bug happened to elevate the account of the person who owns twitter. I'm not saying it was 100% intentional, but it does suggest Musk's account is 'special' in some way.
Did anyone look to see if anyone else was also elevated? Surely there's an extreme measurement bias if the highest followed account gets boosted. There's no evidence to support the idea that only Elon Musk was elevated.
\*
\* These author ID lists are used purely for metrics collection. We track how often we are
\* serving Tweets from these authors and how often their tweets are being impressed by users.
\* This helps us validate in our A/B experimentation platform that we do not ship changes
\* that negatively impacts one group over others.
\*
So now engineers working on the algo can ensure their launches won't lower Elon's tweet visibility. Looks like those remaining at Twitter have a knack for corporate survival.
Companies can't revoke visas of employees... That's just not how H1B Visas work. Yes they can be fired, but they can go find another job and keep the Visa.
Can they? I don't know, but I imagine that at this point, everyone still working for Twitter is there because they don't have any other realistic option.
Most people working there are looking for other jobs. It is not hard to find another job, but in this market it is hard to find one that pays the same. A lot of people have 4 year stock grants and annual refreshers, pushing their compensation very high which can only be matched at other tech companies, which currently are not hiring much.
That's assuming too much in my opinion. Not everyone has the same or similar opinions regarding their work or Elon, even if it's hard for you to believe.
It's harder with visas, because you're not gambling if you can find another job, you're gambling if your employer can acquire a visa in time for you to not be deported.
Right, so it's still justified to feel bad for visa workers in this case, because they are stuck at an abusive workplace because of circumstances of their visa.
With forced RTO and "hardcore" mandates, it's difficult to find 6+ hours of time to interview at other companies (assuming there are any open visa sponsorships available).
According to this one link [0], H1B "tranfers" are not subject to visa caps. Plus you can search for new jobs and start the process while still employed.
Still smells to high heaven to me. Not the Elon part, I don't really care about that. But collecting metrics about "republican" vs "democrat" sounds like a particularly bad set of priorities at work.
Anyone that has worked in social network recommendations (raises hand) knows that they'll be accused of being politically biased, particularly if the recommendations aren't explicitly promoting biased news sites on the Right. (e.g. The Associated Press[0] is leftist propaganda! Where's unbiased news like Gateway Pundit[1] or InfoWars[5]?!) So data scientists and engineers will get pulled in to investigate the latest ref working[2][4], and this will let them easily determine that no, there is no bias.
None of this will matter though, because the complaints are made in bad faith.[2][3]
You may say this is biased comment, but I’m not going to engage in false equivalences, when the outrage and results of the outrage aren’t symmetrical. Cite one story where a major social network (Twitter, Facebook, Google News, YouTube, etc) publicly came out and said that they were adjusting their algorithms to make it more lefty. I’ll wait. This bad faith of the complaints are particularly obvious when the most popular and influential right wing television channel, Fox News, has been caught red handed knowingly spreading conspiracy theories for ratings.[6]
[1] "The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gateway_Pundit
[4] "There is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one." -- Rich Bond, 1992 Republican Party Chairman https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-working...
That doesn't say they did anything about it. Just that right wing complaints had no substance.
In fact, in just over a year from the publication of that blog post, Twitter -- as a matter of official company policy -- would be promoting the unfounded belief that Twitter engineers and scientists were actively engaging in a propaganda campaign against conservatives.
The exact opposite reaction of what I'm looking for.
I know there's a joke about this regarding his ego and there's certainly some truth in that, however it's also quite believable that after a deployment he might have noticed the popularity of his tweets going down (since he no doubt checks his reach), so I can kind of understand how he might see "republicans", "democrats" and "celebrities_it_makes_sense_to_check_this_with_my_account_as_i_am_a_very_active_user" as core categories that need to have their reach balanced.
> it's also quite believable that after a deployment he might have noticed the popularity of his tweets going down
He did notice it and it was treated as a 5 alarm fire, with a Musk cousin sending 2 am slack messages (on a Monday!) to Twitter engineers to urgently fix Elon's reach[1].
Honestly, if you read behind the lines, it sounds like the employee was intentionally making a joke about it at his expense in front of a bunch of people, and I think a lot of CEOs would take that badly as this is effectively the same thing as calling your boss egocentric.
But, we do have a bit of code that measures metrics on his account, so can we find the bit of code that increases the engagement on his account?
> “When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
Reading between the lines, Musk sounds like a giant baby.
No, the "weights" of your model are trained from the input data.
What is usually AB tested are hyperparameters of the model, or different "flavors" of (model+input data).
What people are implying is still unsubstantiated though. The engineers on the Twitter Space say that this is to ensure that changes they make do not bias one category over another, they don't say that it's in order that they can make discretionary updates to bias towards Elon Musk.
Maybe after every update to the model, they check these stats to ensure that they haven't biased towards Elon Musk, and if so roll the change back.
I would not be surprised if “author_is_elon” was added after he bought the company and worked the engineers too hard to figure out why his tweets don’t have a lot of engagement.
[1]: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/home-mixe...