Rod Hilton
Want to know something interesting about the #TwitterCode release?
Lots of people are zeroing in on this section of `HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala`, because it proves that Twitter 1.0 was factoring political alignment on a user-level into the timeline mixing algorithm.
Nobody knows what weights are assigned to these attributes, but them being there shows the algorithm must have had some kind of bias, right?
Guess what.
Those lines were added *after* Elon bought the company.
Rod Hilton
@343max If you don't believe me you can just rationally look at the file and notice that they were added after the `author_is_elon` definition, which was added a month or so ago shortly before February 13th when the story broke that he'd demanded an engineer uprank his content.
Max von Webel
@rodhilton How do you know?
Rod Hilton
@343max And given that the author_is_elon one was only added a month ago, doesn't it seem WEIRDLY suspicious that in the last 30 days these two attributes were added, since they were added AFTER he announced the code would be released?
In fact, added to the very end of the file, where they were most likely to be noticed?
Almost like the express purpose of this release was to provide evidence of political bias?
It was one of the first things @wongmjane found:
Rod Hilton
@343max Alright here's what I'll say to that. Take a look at the top of the file, or any file in the repo, and notice that the import statements are strictly alphabetically ordered.
Open one of the BUILD.bazel files and notice the same thing with dependencies, very strictly lexicographically ordered.
The way that long lists of stuff avoided conflicts was with tools that automatically ordered most lists into alphabetical order. That was the standard in the Twitter codebase...
Rod Hilton
@343max ...the ONLY exception to the very strict "must be alphabetical" ordering standard was when something was an append-to-the-end list, in order to preserve the history of when things were added at a glance.
The fact that this list is not alphabetical indicates it was intentionally ordered append-to-the-end.
There is no such thing as adding things to "random places" in a long list at Twitter.
Max von Webel
@rodhilton Reading the list in detail I have to agree: it seems obvious new lines where added at the end. Starting from very technical stuff and getting somewhat broader in application.
Max von Webel
@rodhilton Thanks. Yes, adding it to the bottom makes sense but sometimes people add stuff in random places to prevent merge conflicts. It sounds a bit like you know for reasons that you can’t talk about, which is fair I guess. I was hoping for bulletproof proof.
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