The Siloed Mind

As an experiment in connection with my Genocide Joe project, I became active on X (formally Twitter) for the first time on January 15, 2024. Before that, I believe I had only made one post back in 2013 (as I write today January 28, 2024, I can only track my "timeline" on X back to sometime on January 19th). When I became active on or about January 15th, I had 6 followers. 

My activity starting on January 15th was heavily focused on propagandizing around the genocide taking place in Gaza, and the West Bank of Palestine. I made a concerted effort to engage with and follow both Zionist and anti-Zionist users. I spent several hours per day seeking out diverse voices, being rather undescriminating. This gave me a good insight into the various rhetorical lines of discourse that were underway in the X space. As was to be expected, I was treated to a barage of images of the suffering of the Gazans, accounts (often filled with puriant fantasies) of the atrocities of October 7, 2023 -- along with anti-Semitic vindictive, and Zionist intent to continue commiting genocide. Indicative is the following image. 

The person who posted the image on X says that they captured it from a Telegram channel (another social media application). It is difficult to tell which narratives were true, and which were not. There certainly were many inaccuracies that were effectively corrected. But who knows how many went uncorrected. I know that many users are repeating over and over again false accounts of October 7th. More than a couple of times I had to tell other users that X is not a place for rational discourse. 

But it is a place for propaganda. And as we watched a genocide unfolding in real-time, the rhetoric was nauseating. As I posted on January 23rd, "Went into an @X hole for the first time over the past week. It was a clockwork orange viewing of the ideological inception of genocide." 

Nonetheless, amongst all the twisted rhetoric, there were many people who demonstrated a high degree of human dignity. I think this is the first big takeaway from the experience. Although X tends to bring out the worste in people, it does also allow for people to show their best self. And I think I began to become genuine friends with some of the people on X. We had some good reparte, and voices began to sound familiar and comforting. There were a good number of such voices. This was something I had never experienced before. In the past I had only one purely online friend. 

One reason that a certain collection of voices began to feel like a community was that X is very effective at siloing users. Although I actively sought out genocidal Zionist voices as well as others that I sharply disagreed with, I soon found that I was almost exclusively engaging with a relatively small number of users. As I write this on January 28th, my profile shows that I am following 2,526 users. As I said above, I was purposefully undiscriminating in selcting accounts to follow. So, I would say that in the two weeks of activity, I had significant interaction with probably less than 3,000 users. And as the days went on, I probably was interacting with less than 500 in the last few days. The siloing is very strong. 

Interestingly, I found that people on X self-silo. They take great pride in blocking users that they disagree with. When you block someone, you don't see their posts, and they don't see yours. You are cut off from one another. I can see that this feature could be useful when you find you have some kind of trolling stocker. But I was surprised how people used it as some sort of attempt to punish the user being blocked -- and simply for having the wrong opinion. I don't understand this. I posted once saying, "I think the blocking mechanism is a bug, not a feature." --But again, X is not a place for rational discourse. 

Genreally that is true, but sometimes X can be a place for the most rational of discourse. I had an interesting dialogue with Hairy Manilow. 

Thursday morning, January 25, I had reached about 250 followers 

Noticed that I was losing followers sometimes more quickly than I was gaining them -- I guess due to blocking behavor -- especially from Zionists -- because I was not getting much in my feed from Zionists. 

Also noticed that GayBaristaPaul was only getting a few hundred views on his posts when they had 14.3k followers. There would be less than 200 views on a post that was over 24 hours old. How is that possible. That means that many posts were getting less that 1.4% of the follwer population. 

In looking through GayBarisaPaul's past posts, I see that many, if not all, of my replies to his posts have been deleted (or maybe they are just hidden). 

Crescendo leading up to ICJ announcement Thursday night -- TrueMandelaEffect 

Immediately after the ICJ ruling, I began promoting "take a win post" . I was getting a good response. I sensed that I was starting to breakthrough, and garner something of an audience. I was getting a lot of likes and reposts -- dozens per hour at times, whereas before I would maybe get a dozen per day. I really felt that I had had some small but significant impact on people's lives as they dealt with the trauma. 

By Friday night I received a message from X saying that I might be in violation of their policies. They had me do a human confirmation puzzle to start some sort of appeal process. 

On Saturday, I had a family event to attend, so I check X only briefly here and there.

And then on Sunday it became clear that my account was shadow banned.  I wasn't getting many likes or responses. There was a reason for that. 

I could still use the application as I usually would, but nobody -- or at least very few users -- were seeing my activity. 

Another user, Michael Peifer (@flakyfarseer) noticed the phenomenon. 

Not long after Michael contacted me, I stopped receiving any likes or replies. I think the likes and replies I received earlier in the day were residual effects of posts and replies I made from Friday. 

When everything came to an absolute hault on Sunday, I had 323 followers.

The whole experience shows me that X is highly manipulated. It is nothing like a "market place of ideas" as many believe it to be. For those who enjoy it, I think it can have a real-world impact. I think Craig Murray was right. However, knowing that the executives and programmers are engaged in an extreme form of social engineering, it just isn't enjoyable for me. 

By February 6, 445 followers -- having slowed down my engagement with the app dramatically -- but still actively participating several hours per day. 

According to: https://web.archive.org/web/20231012220459/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/technology/twitter-x-tweets-elon-musk.html 

there are tens of millions of active users. But as of February 6, I had any minimal contact with about 4,000 users. And as far as regular contact, I would say it is less than 100. Mostly it is the same two dozen or so users that I see, and that see me. 

The model seems to be one of negative reinforcement -- that is a system of punishment. The more a post starts to take off, the more the reach is throttled -- so if views, likes and reposts are the reward mechanism, the better you behave to get those rewards, the more stingy the rewards become. For me -- and maybe I'm different -- the whole thing is highly unmotivating. 

For example, the following is one of my very first simple post not containing any quote of other material. 

"How does one deny the deliberate extermination of two million people? Is it about the number? Are we back to this?"

Within about 15 minutes it had 28 views -- beyond the typical cap of 24 at this time (Feb 6) -- and it had 7 likes -- 25% like rate. Very good, and the views and likes continued to go up for a few minutes beyond that. But then you could see the throttling. The post was made at 11:44, and as of 16:30 there are now 96 views with 14 likes (15% like rate). Almost 5 hours in. I have 446 followers. So it has reached about 22% of my followers -- much better than most of my posts. But there is something of a logarithmic curve -- where the views approach some asymptotic limit. And it appears that there is some trade off with other posts close in time to this one. Most of the recent posts put out while this one went out have less than 15 views -- well below the typical 24 cap. 

I'm creating screenshots here, because it appears that X is not being archived in the Wayback Machine.