Why does Twitter show us tweets from profiles we don’t follow?

“How come I only see users I don’t follow? Has Twitter broken again?”: to take a tour on the social network owned by Elon Musk It’s not uncommon to find comments like this. In fact, for a few weeks now the platform has decided to take a strategy that started a few months ago to an even deeper level.

We could call it, with an undoubtedly overused formula, Twitter tiktokization. A formula that provides, more than anything else, the suggestion of new content through artificial intelligence starting from the user’s interests, precisely on the model inaugurated by TikTok. In recent months, many platforms have chosen this path: the first, among the controversies, was Meta with Facebook and Instagram. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, it seems that the solution is working: 2022 was a year of rebound for Zuckerberg’s social networks, the use of which has tended to increase worldwide, perhaps also thanks to the suggestions of new content through AI.

For Twitter, everything it started last January, when the social network announced the introduction of a timeline For You, a homepage where you can see content suggested by the algorithm, based on your interests. Alongside this function, a more classic timeline is still available, called Following, with only the followed accounts inside.

In short, what everyone is noticing now it has already been a reality for a few months. With one small difference: Until recently, content suggestions from unfollowed accounts were somewhat justified by the platform. It appeared, a small indication of why the user was seeing that very post, perhaps because someone among the followed profiles had interacted with it. That’s not the case anymore, and Twitter has made the process a little more invisible and less transparent. Let’s try to understand together how to orient themselves and better manage your personal timeline.

What Twitter shows us in the For You section

Let’s start from the beginning: the section For you, the default one when we open Twitteris programmed to show a mix of tweets from followed profiles and other content that is popular or that the algorithm deems suitable for us by theme, topic or format.

There is a Twitter page (only available in English) which explains this process well: “We screen each tweet using a variety of indicators, including its popularity and how people in your network interact with it.” Translated: those contents that you see are the sum of two circumstances. On the one hand there is the popularity, of the post itself or of the topic; on the other, the relationship that the user’s network has with the profile that published it. In other words, when we see a tweet from an account we don’t followthe questions to ask are essentially two: how popular is that content and who, among the users you follow, likes that tweet or that profile.

It all starts from one knowledge of interests of the user: on the basis of individual interactions with the contents shown, the system is able to understand, albeit in a coarse way, the topics on which each of us wants to receive more information. The selection starts from there: if Twitter understands that I’m interested in the politics and allo sportwill show me the most popular or liked content from my network on those topics.

Obviously, there are other variables at play, like, the format: Twitter is trying to push on videoslike all major social networks (always to chase TikTok), and the Blue subscriptionwhich guarantees a algorithmic priority. Unless you’re Elon Musk.

In a experiment conducted in recent weeks, the US journalist Ryan Broderick has discovered that, in fact, videos are among the favorite content of the new Twitter algorithm. A system that also tends to favor accounts part of the Twitter Topics program, a function for organizing content based on topic. Finally, the algorithm would have a preference for tweets, including replies, that talk about or comment on trending topicsbetter if coming from social networks close to that of the user.

The experimentation

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What to do to regain control

As is often the case with recommendation algorithms, however, there is a degree of customization for the user. In particular, it’s enlightening to take a look at the interests that Twitter has selected for us, to understand why we see or don’t see certain content. It’s simple: stop going up SettingsThen Privacy and security and from there on Content you see. At that point, logging into Interests it is possible to see a list of topics in which the platform considers us interested.

From there, you can tune in recommendations, manually deleting the arguments that we no longer want to see in our timeline.