Maybe populists just tweet better? Maybe populism, the way it is understood today, just is social media driven politics, so that "populists do better on social media" is a tautology?
Remember that old study (which got flagged here!) which claimed Musk tuned the algorithms in favor of republicans starting on..... the day of the assassination attempt? Laughable!
Yeah, the endorsement was mentioned - while the assassination attempt was not.
Here is a quote from that study:
> In Phase Two, comparing Republican-leaning and Democrat-leaning accounts, we again observed an engagement shift around the same date, affecting all metrics
It's so obvious that an assassination attempt on a republican candidate will boost republican engagement MORE than democrats. It's just as obvious that a corona virus outbreak in close proximity to a laboratory which works on corona viruses, escaped very likely from that lab. Common sense. Also for weeks after the event, of course republicans continued to be more riled up about it.
This is not science. If the claim is that Musk tuned the algorithms at that special date, you have to prove it by other means, other than engagement being boosted at that day and weeks to follow.
"These results show that X disproportionately highlights extremes of the German political spectrum, in particular the populist parties: left-wing BSW and right-wing AfD."
I'm guessing rage baiting drives engagement...
(And reminds me of Bertrand Russell's nobel prize speech in which he talks about what happens when two men are bored in a pub...
Are political bots now on HN as well?
This is such a polarizing post willfully ignoring legislation and historical background. Aimed at dividing public opinion instead of discussing the topic at hand: political influence of X through feed aggregation.
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