Twitter users have expressed outrage over the new timeline, launching the hashtag #RIPTwitter whilst claiming the change would inevitably wreck the very essence of the chirping social network.
#RIPTwitter give us real time or give us death pic.twitter.com/WxUGQ6RUX7
— Infidel (@HeidiL_RN) 6 February 2016
Still, the consequences could be much more serious and sinister.
According to Motherboard, Twitter's new algorithm is a means to manipulate users and harvest information about them.
Twitter stands for freedom of expression, speaking truth to power, and empowering dialogue. That starts with safety. https://t.co/PbEoM1lCyb
— Jack (@jack) February 9, 2016
tweet like no ones reading them.
— RejectedLifeSaver (@RejctedLifeSavr) March 1, 2016
~new twitter algorithm
The story's author Vijith Assar says that although continual chronological feeds "may be overwhelming, at least they can be trusted."
On the contrary, the principle underpinning the new algorithm will be unknown to everybody but Twitter's honchos.
@TheBubbleBubble yes they did something 2 weeks ago I no longer get prison planet or info wars tweets in my timeline. Censorship period.
— jdh111 (@jdhagemann) February 29, 2016
It is obvious that in order to show tweets that are more interesting to this or that user, Twitter will have to rely on monitoring users' activity much more heavily.
"Actually, Twitter does not yet have a magic algorithm that knows what you are interested in, and it likely never will," Assar says.
"What Twitter does have […] is exhaustive tracking of your user actions on their platform, and it can use that to power the fine tuning. Nearly every action taken through a Twitter client or via the API requires authentication, which means the company always has a record of who you are and what you are doing."
It is likely that, at least in the beginning, Twitter's new system will not be really accurate in showing what really interests each of us. But after users start interacting with the new interface our activities will be a touchstone to fine-tune the new algorithm.
204 notifications on twitter this morning… 204!
— HighlyRecommended! (@TheHighShow) February 25, 2016
190 of them were spam bots
Twtters new algorithm is working then
It is also probable that the social network will use so-called "polls" to further perfect the new timeline structure.
This will mean that more and more data will be fed to the machine, in an endless loop.
This is not just eerie for privacy reasons, but has more subtle implications.
I seem to have come down with the Twitter algorithm
— Ten Second Cynic (@TenSecondCynic) February 21, 2016
An obvious example is an experiment Facebook carried out in 2014, when it decided to show a doctored timeline to 700,000 of its users and gauge how their behavior changed.
They discovered that if a user's feed was engineered to show them only posts with a certain undertone, the user's emotional state change accordingly.
Twitter's new timeline, by feeding us tweets about things we like — or which Twitter thinks we like — could become dangerous echo chambers, or, worse, lab cages in which we are the online guinea pigs.
