Björn 𖣂 Quercus ⚧︎ Ⓐ

Imagine choosing racism when psychedelic mushrooms are right there.

They support that

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Looking into Wreck This Deck and Pirate Borg as potential games in the coming year. #wreckthisdeck #pirateborg #morkborg

These are concentration camps. Don't think that these aren't concentration camps simply because there aren't gas chambers. The Nazis began to build and operate camps in 1933, but it wasn't until 1939 that they began gassing their prisoners. This is the path we're on.

Fuck all these white supremacists.

Slurs Filled a Chat Created by a Republican Party Official in Florida After the secretary of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party created the chat for college students, it devolved into slurs against Black and Jewish people.

damn it’s crazy how the slurs filled the chat all by themselves. couldn’t be helped i’m sure. chats are always devolving of their own accord

I can’t help remembering Randy Thomas’ infamous “I’m just… Randy” ad for Exodus International.

You’re right, of course. It’s still a bizarre combination of clips. William Wallace? Kylo Ren? Deadpool? None American, one a villain, one famously pansexual/inclusively sexual …

Google pledges roughly three hours of its annual profit to fight climate change Google and others are committing $100 million to combat climate change.

The perfect headline doesn’t exi…

the only consistent funny thing about trump is how little he respects anyone in his orbit

Read more about what this case means for press freedom in this op-ed by @seth-stern.bsky.social in @theintercept.com, published in Nov.

If you must pay for a Proton account for a radical project, pay with cash (you can mail it) or washed crypto (Monero -> Bitcoin).

All credit card payments are traceable, even to a privacy-focused company.

Your security model should not rely on a business to fight the state on your behalf.

Can confirm, every Signal chat in town either said nothing or made one snide comment and then immediately got back to work

Mine turns 35 this year.

My email address turns 35 this year.

I will never get the AIM open/close door sounds out of my head for as long as I live

I got my bluesky invite from a friend I first met on IRC

do not cite the deep magic to us

kill the imposter syndrome in you head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they're also using chat gpt to do it

Anyways.

Vance and Dolan beefing is incredibly funny to me given how much water Dolan has carried for this administration and the trads writ large

oh word???? the 24/7 racism caucus kept doing racism 24/7 even when it created problems for you personally???? whomst could have predicted

i'm not an economist but if 900 people can afford to fund $3,000 checks to damn near everyone else in america and still be insanely fuckin rich afterwards maybe they have too much fuckin money

If human rights are limited to certain groups, they are not really human rights, are they?

Anti-Trans Zealots inventing a moral panic to deflect actual sexual coercion they've engaged in for decades.

When I came out as Trans as a teen, I was consistently told I should just be a gay man and pushed to sleep with men before transition even though I only ever expressed attraction to women.

literally your customer base was 90% parents of young children who want a good future for their kids in which they can be free to be themselves, no matter who they are. you told those people to go fuck themselves. they won't be back

One day, one beautiful day, people will learn to recognise fascist dog whistles. "Islamists and woke progressives" means brown people and gays. "Told how to vote" means the Jews did it because brown people and gays don't have agency, only cishet whites and Jews.

“I Never Thought He Would Ask Me To Build Doombots,” said the contractor who builds robots for Doctor Doom

This is a type of ICE "ruse," and is a tactic the agency has deployed for decades.

In 2015, ICE went to my former client's house posing as cops and convinced his 16-year-old US citizen niece to call him home from work with a fake story (the "identity theft ruse" explained below), then arrested him.

the fact that most American workers live in such precarity that they can’t afford to travel to other parts of the world and see how other people live is not a coincidence - it is part of this country’s very design.

the most notable part of the far right buying up legacy news media is that liberals generally always trusted legacy media far more, aside from places like fox news. the downstream effect of this, maybe intentionally, is to have more people distrust media. misinformation will spread easier

Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage. PLUS: 10,000 drivers call on Uber to repay stolen wages, a man is arrested at a public hearing about a data center and more.

Across the US, people fed up with Flock cameras surveilling their communities, and with local governments that are often unwilling to listen to concerns over privacy violations and ICE data sharing practices, are taking matters into their own hands—and tearing them down.