[jerf]

You seem to have added to c4n4rd's post the assertion that this is OK. I don't think it was intended that way. The point is not "This is ok because it lines Twitter's pockets", it is more "This is why it is happening. What else did you expect?"

[zeteo]

I think we should expect more, the same way we'd expect food producers to not poison us and truck operators to not run us over. Twitter has become a major platform for public discourse (including elections) and needs to at least have some transparency into their deletion and shadowbanning decisions.

[z4chj]

That comes from government regulation. The FDA keeps your food from poisoning you. As of now, there is no structure in place forcing twitter to keep the spread of information alive and well.

[jerf]

I'd also point out that structurally, food companies are strongly disincentivized to quickly kill their customers, as they'd like to sell you something tomorrow, too. (Slowly killing their customers is a potential strategy, though anyone who wishes to dance on capitalism's grave with that has a lot of very pointy questions to answer about the government's involvement with the way the food industry may be slowly killing us.)

Twitter is mostly incentivized to keep eyeballs on their site no matter what. If that means using highly sophisticated machine learning algorithms to lock people in a soft, warm filter bubble in which they are eternally flattered for their opinions and never encounter a reason to leave, so be it.

In fact arguably Silicon Valley's biggest social-media challenge they are facing right now is that the world is trying to force them to recognize that not everybody wants to be locked in the same bubble that a Silicon Valley liberal does, a lesson that they are still trying to resist. It would probably be worth billions for Facebook and Twitter to give up on that dream and instead help people into their own custom soft warm filter bubble. If they don't do it, somebody else will.

I'm not celebrating this, simply observing that every month the money gradient Facebook, Twitter, and so on are facing to head down this road is going to get steeper.