This exactly.. But without the models or policies we can only infer, which give plausible deniability.

Can't say I'm shocked overall, but it's strange to see it so 'on the nose'

I suspect it plays into this stuff: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

They wanted to answer the questions of "is twitter biased against Republicans" so they measured it, turns out they favored republicans.

> sounds pretty suspicious.

Sounds toxic to me

About 40% of US voters are not registered with any political party, so at least they will avoid whatever this triggers.

So you imagine these tags are set by looking account names up on state voter registration lists?

Well, if not, then the tags have such a large error bar as to be meaningless.

Or the data is assumed good and used dangerously.

And then there is the rest of the world.

but the people who care about stats are usually american politicians. they can present them with this data. (and use Elon as a control LOL)

Anyone that has worked in social network recommendations (raises hand) knows that they'll be accused of being politically biased, particularly if the recommendations aren't explicitly promoting biased news sites on the Right. (e.g. The Associated Press[0] is leftist propaganda! Where's unbiased news like Gateway Pundit[1] or InfoWars[5]?!) So data scientists and engineers will get pulled in to investigate the latest ref working[2][4], and this will let them easily determine that no, there is no bias.

None of this will matter though, because the complaints are made in bad faith.[2][3]

You may say this is biased comment, but I’m not going to engage in false equivalences, when the outrage and results of the outrage aren’t symmetrical, especially when the most popular and influential right wing television channel, Fox News, has been caught red handed knowingly spreading conspiracy theories for ratings.[6]

[0] "Associated Press is the least biased according to both Democrats and Republicans." https://www.businessinsider.com/most-biased-news-outlets-in-...

[1] "The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gateway_Pundit

[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-22-mn-26779-...

[3] "Internal report finds ‘virtually identical’ rates of conservative and liberal topics, but guidelines updated to ‘exclude possibility of improper actions’" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/24/facebook-...

[4] "There is some strategy to it [bashing the ‘liberal’ media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one." -- Rich Bond, 1992 Republican Party Chairman https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-working...

[5] “InfoWars is an American far-right conspiracy theory and fake news website owned by Alex Jones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars

[6] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/all-the-texts-fox-ne...

Well, there was this:

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...

That doesn't say they did anything about it. Just that right wing complaints had no substance.

In fact, in just over a year from the publication of that blog post, Twitter -- as a matter of official company policy -- would be promoting the unfounded belief that Twitter engineers and scientists were actively engaging in a propaganda campaign against conservatives.

The exact opposite reaction of what I'm looking for.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142666067/elon-musk-is-using...

I think it says a lot about the complaints. Some people just can't stop crying wolf to get attention

It’s not just to complain. It’s an actual political strategy.