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According to Twitter, people who left and joined Twitter after news that Elon Musk was planning to buy caused huge fluctuations in the follower count of prominent American political figures.
Accounts of current and former elected officials have experienced sharp increases and dramatic losses in followers on the platform in the days surrounding the announcement of Mr.
For example, former President Barack Obama lost 300,000 followers after the announcement, while Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene added nearly 90,000 followers, according to NBC.
Twitter told The Washington Times it’s investigating the mass exodus of followers, but it believes the surges are largely the result of new accounts created and disabled in recent days, rather than spam or inauthentic behavior.
The takeover of Mr Musk, an advocate of fewer restrictions on online speech, has brought some political conservatives back and ranked liberals. Conservative speaker Mark Levin said Monday he has decided to return to the platform due to incoming ownership and was welcomed by Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren called Mr Musk’s upcoming acquisition “dangerous for democracy” and said strong rules are needed to hold big tech companies accountable.
“The extreme antibody response of those who fear freedom of expression says it all,” Mr Musk said on Twitter. He added that he opposes censorship that goes far beyond what the law provides.
The company’s new ownership will take the different audiences to court and shut it down. But Twitter’s latest fix with its machine-learning algorithm could also provide clues for spikes.
Earlier this month, Twitter detailed its “responsible machine learning initiative” and stated that the artificially intelligent tools Twitter uses “could affect hundreds of millions of Tweets a day.”
According to Twitter’s Jutta Williams and Rumman Chowdhury, the effort included an in-depth analysis of content recommendations for different political ideologies in seven countries.
“Technical solutions alone do not resolve the potentially harmful effects of algorithmic decisions,” Twitter staffers said earlier this month. “Our Responsible ML working group is interdisciplinary and made up of people from across the company, including technical, research, trust and security, and product teams.”
A Twitter spokesperson did not answer questions about whether the new machine learning work was affecting the behavior of people on the platform, which is reflected in the fluctuating follower counts.
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