Well, if Facebook were able to change the news feed to focus more on friends and family and away from their $-cow companies and advertisers, then maybe Twitter can change.

If anything we should take it extremely seriously in as much as we're getting to a point where private companies undertake research projects on how the can alter the public discourse through algorithms.

I'm not saying that has to be bad. It could very well be good too. But it does open some fairly terrifying possibilities as well.

Yeah but Facebook haven't really fixed the problem. That change was a nudge in the right direction but News Feed is still fundamentally optimized for engagement. Hyper-partisan content is just more engaging than nonpartisan content.