What we are perhaps discovering now is the extent to which the algorithm obeys a specific political interest. A billionaire who ran in the de facto US presidential election is the eccentric owner of a digital system that helps shape public opinion.
A few hours after creating a Bluesky account, I had the experience everyone was talking about. I wrote the same message on both social networks, X and Bluesky, and compared the responses on both. The result was surprising. On Twitter, the post received 397 positive interactions compared to 718 on Bluesky. However, if we keep in mind that I have more than a million followers on Twitter, compared to ten thousand for Bluesky, the difference widens considerably (0.361 per thousand followers on Twitter compared to 72 per thousand in the case of Bluesky).
My case only confirmed something that many users had already experienced before, on a more or less large scale. And this suggests that X’s algorithm works in a way that produces relative invisibility for certain accounts. It is unclear whether this is something premeditated against certain groups – for example those on the left – or whether the algorithm simply rewards other types of posts. But there is something perverse about all this, and even if we do not know precisely what it is, there is no doubt that we perceive and experience it.
Social media algorithms function as information filters, giving enormous power to whoever designs them. One obvious effect is that it distorts the way we see the world. This reminds me of those guided tours that exist in tourist towns; when you get on a bus and passively visit the places that others have selected. When you get out of the vehicle, you take with you a certain image of the city, even if it is not entirely accurate – probably, for example, you have not seen the less sexy parts of the city. At least, one could say, we know the prejudices of the service and we know what we stand for. The same is not true on social media, where we are generally profoundly defenseless.
Most users of social networks do not know that when they access Facebook, Instagram or X, they will find a selection of information that a robot has made according to the company’s criteria. And the company will generally only seek to maximize its profits. For this, naturally, it will distract your attention as much as possible. The fact is that you become addicted, thanks to dopamine, to this infinite scroll that shows you endless videos, images and general information that keeps you attentive. This selection means that instead of seeing messages from your loved ones recounting their daily lives, or the quiet musings of a philosopher or scientist, you receive other types of information that can be violent, commercial, tense , exciting and above all never innocent. .
We already knew all this. What we are perhaps discovering now is the extent to which the algorithm obeys a specific political interest. A billionaire who ran in the de facto US presidential election is the eccentric owner of a digital system that helps shape public opinion and the emotional state of tens of millions of people around the world.
It’s like when you get on that tour bus it turns out the driver is a madman who can decide what you can’t see and what you’re going to see even if you don’t want to. It won’t let you see that the city can actually be beautiful; He won’t show you museums, co-ops, parks or anything that makes you think of a pleasant future for humanity. But what he will show you, perhaps by putting a clamp on your eyelids so you can’t look away, is violence, fear and chaos; images, on the other hand, which will be recorded in your retina and in your brain and which will frighten you and block you. You will only see what he wants you to see while he fills his wallet with hate-stained bills. But the worst part will be that what he teaches you isn’t even true. In many cases, these are just tips. And with them they will make you believe, for example, that the murder of a young woman can occur in your neighborhood, and that your house can be occupied by immigrants at the slightest mistake, and that people change sex like those who change neighborhood. . He wants you to be afraid and paralyzed, and that’s the service he’s offering you. Would it not be better, for our health and that of our fellow citizens, to immediately get out of this terrifying vehicle?
The ancient Greeks considered it very important that all “demos” had equal access to the word – although it never hurts to remember that they excluded women and slaves. They called him isegoryand sometimes this was symbolized by the fact that the bearer of the word in an assembly had a crown on his head. In reality, in modern societies, we have never had equity in access to speech, which the mainstream media have been reminding us for years by their own existence. However, the novelty here is that the billionaire gives the crown to the worst in society: we only hear the cries of idiots while the common sense of others is drowned in silence.
My experiment post also received around 40 replies on Bluesky, most of them informative and friendly. In X, the responses were more than 220, but all without exception were insults and contempt. A huge network of organized harassment against which little can be done since the billionaire withdrew the tools to fight against such phenomena, and which prevents any fruitful dialogue. A place you can only leave with even more anxiety and depression.
We don’t know how Bluesky will evolve. However, I believe this new beginning allows us to reconnect with the original idea from which Twitter was born: the belief that we need a common space to share knowledge and experiences, as well as to dialogue and debate with respect. I like to follow people whose judgment I trust and who recommend articles or books to read or who offer insightful opinions that make me think. I want to believe that there are also those who benefit from what I write and recommend myself. Furthermore, I am certain that the left can better enrich and prosper – and of course rebuild itself – if it weaves a community out of these attitudes. Of course, it’s far less likely that we have anything to gain, individually or collectively, if our time and energy are spent sharing what little time we have with monsters. Unless we want to become one of them.
