Why specifically track political parties? Where is author_is_american? Or author_is_mayonnaise_enjoyer?

Maybe it was a choice made many years ago that they thought was appropriate, but we can't yet know it's not used for other purposes. We can at least be reasonably sure they've added the author_is_elon within the past year. I would have thought there would be many more descriptors, or non-controversial descriptors.

Or maybe Elon specifically added those before releasing this code to get people riled up.

Twitter became a very politically charged platform after 2016, mainly among Americans. They'd be idiots not to take advantage of that.

The point is probably to check that changes they make aren’t accidentally politically biased.

You say it’s not nefarious but isn’t that how echo chambers are created?

I don't believe echo chambers are nefarious - there's no hidden agenda involved with them. That's just how recommendation algorithms work, and it's what most people want.

But if someone finds some code that suppresses recommendations from a specific political ideology across the board, that would be nefarious, IMO.

Echo chambers may not be nefarious, but they are insidious.

They can be if they're involuntary and inescapable, but neither is the case for Twitter. It's designed around letting you curate your own feed, but it also constantly throws random stuff in through retweets and quote tweets - which is what people hate the most about the platform.

I don't believe discrimination is nefarious - there is no hidden agenda involved. That's just how societies work, it's natural behaviour - to belong to a group they identify with and to keep out strangers and weirdos.

This comment likely violates the guidelines both in form and content.

I don't believe repeating someone's comment nearly verbatim is as clever as you want it to be, nor do I believe recommendation algorithms are equivalent to the kinds of societal discrimination you allude to, nor would any reasonable person.

Instead of trying very hard to be clever, please next time try just as hard to make a valid point. I know it can be difficult when you think you smell karma in the water but do try.

The echo chamber in your first point does the suppression in the second.

Having a separate flag to track engagement specifically for Elon tweets isn't nefarious, but weird.