Twitter deliberately underestimates the reach of tweets about the war in Ukraine

on March 31, Elon Musk announced the publication of a part of Twitter’s recommendation code on the GitHub repository. The billionaire assured that users will find «many inconvenient problems» there, but they will be eliminated over time. The Ukrainian segment of the platform and the international Twitter community found such problems quickly. It turned out that the recommendation algorithms actively promote Musk’s own posts, while messages about Russia’s war against Ukraine have a lower rating.

Most of the recommendation algorithm will be made open source today. The rest will follow.

The acid test is that independent third parties should be able to determine, with reasonable accuracy, what will probably be shown to users.

No doubt, many embarrassing issues will be … t.co/41U4oexIev

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 31, 2023

on April 1, a US user under the nickname @aakashg0 published a large thread in which he analyzed the code of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm in detail. In particular, he found out that tweets related to Ukraine («UkraineCrisisTopic») have low reach. This means that users are less likely to see them in their feeds.

However, it is unclear what kind of content is meant by «UkraineCrisisTopic» due to a lack of documentation in the code. Twitter developers also did not provide any explanation. Users assume that this includes tweets from the military on the front line, videos of Russian equipment being destroyed, volunteer gatherings, or mentions of Ukrainian soldiers in captivity.

6. Misinformation is highly down-ranked

Anything that is categorized as misinformation gets the rug pulled out from under it.

Surprisingly, so are posts about Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/MgLUOmDbSZ

— Aakash Gupta? Product Growth Guy (@aakashg0) April 1, 2023

Also, @aakashg0 found a function in the code that tracks activity related to tweets from American Democrats, Republicans, and Musk himself. The enthusiast’s tweet caused a great deal of excitement and has so far garnered more than 12 million views.

Musk himself did not react to the outrage of the social network community.

It should be noted that last October, the billionaire publicly embarrassed himself because of his «plan to establish peace» between Russia and Ukraine. In particular, Musk believed that Ukraine should give Crimea to the terrorist state and not join any military alliances.

In February of this year, SpaceX announced that it had taken measures to prevent the Ukrainian military from using Starlink satellite internet to control drones for military purposes. In March, the then head of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, assured that there were no problems with Starlink’s operation at the front line, and the satellite Internet would work there «as long as it takes to win.»