Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by msravi 516 days ago
I use X to mostly follow politics and some math/physics, and the political feed in the "For you" tab is remarkably balanced. I actually maintain two separate lists called "Left" and "Right" that I slot accounts into, and I just go to each list's feed to see what each side is saying about something. The "For you" tab has a mix, and overall has been pretty well balanced.
4 comments

I know that Twitter is US site but I still find it strange when people talk about balanced political views and talk only about 2-sides. Yes it is one more than in China but still...
I'm not from the US, but from India, and it's the same here. "Left" and "Right" may be misnomers, but there are effectively two main blocks at the national level, and supporters of each block get slotted into one of the two. Of course there are disagreements between members within each of the two blocks, but ultimately all the fine distinctions boil down to which of these two a voter would choose!
Yeah, same for Poland.

You're either PiS/Konfederacja supporter, or PO/Left/P2050 parties. There is no chance of any other coalition, and everyone knows this.

Choice is - do you want to dismantle democracy, or would you rather not. Sigh.

It really is unique to everyone and who they follow.

But when the US election came around all of our business For You feeds switched to political, far-right content even though we are not in the US nor political. And the fact that the EU is investigating X for its algorithm changes means at least some other people have had the same experience.

That's not balanced though. Only a small subset of people decides to actively talk about politics on social media. So most likely you see just the opinions of radicalized cronically online left-wing people and the opinions of radicalized cronically online right-wing people. None of those represent the real world and their arguments are almost always a repetition of the same bad-faith take on the current issue, just to get easy engagement from their community. It's not really a representative (or healthy) window to society.

That's the trap of politics on social media, they give you the illusion that you get a pulse of what society is thinking, when you actually just see a very vocal minority repeating the same arguments over and over again.

Same. I follow more 'right' and see also balanced left.

Thus I was wondering why people were always talking about hate and racism on x.

Bluesky is a different story, there I exclusively see left wing content. Full of hate.

When you’re used to hearing one thing….