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How Twitter misleads us about how many people have left and what to do about it

Dr. J. Nathan Matias – Medium: “Why are so many people staying on Twitter, even after the company gutted its child safety team, struggled with information security problems, violated user privacy for political ends, and brought nazis back to the platform? To outside observers, it can seem like Twitter users are continuing as before, seemingly unaware of the millions of people who have left. “You left Twitter?” a friend recently remarked, “I hadn’t noticed.” Yet many of the accounts I follow haven’t tweeted in ages, and roughly 15% of them have already set up accounts on Mastodon. (I’m at @[email protected]) How can so many people be unaware of a mass exodus from the platform? One reason is that social media feeds are designed to mislead us about the average opinions and behaviors of the people in our lives. The distorting effects of Twitter’s timeline and algorithm cause people to stay on the platform by making it seem like life continues as normal, despite the wasteland they occupy…” [And I am https://newsie.social/@bespacific]

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