> I thought it was interesting how it explicitly doesn't boost independents. So much of the two-party system is self-reinforcing.

Is it boosting? Others are claiming this code is just for metrics collection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391896.

But on the topic of Democrats vs. Republican vs. independent; a big factor may be that "Democrat" and "Republican" are much more cohesive groups and therefore much easier to define. No one can honestly define "independent" except in a kind of "none of the above" sense, since they can range anywhere from extreme right, to the center, to the extreme left.

Also how about.... everyone else in the world who is not an American voter?

I thought it was interesting that twitter thinks the U.S is the world

Or anti-statists! Not everyone who engages with politics is a bootlicker for authoritarianism but it sure feels like there’s no space made for this perspective (obviously)

Isn't it intrinsically self-reinforcing, if you have a winner takes all system? It's almost always better to join an existing team than start a new one.

The vast majority of self-proclaimed independents vote with one party just as reliably as registered members.

I'd be interested in which bin people like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Susan Collins, et. al. are placed.

Especially for people that aren't... you know.. Americans.

Unless they mean actual public figure party members which are known and probably verified.

you could probably algorithmically determine it in most cases based on any number of indicators from phrases used, to communities interacted with, which hashtages are included, which cohort retweets and likes most etc... thats not even getting into simply tagging political figures with the party they officially affiliate themselves with

Likely they are tracking performance verified politician accounts based on registered party affiliation. Why republican should count equal in the evaluation metric to democrat when nunerically there are less republican voters, let alone proportions on Twitter, is another question.

And how are they choosing to balance them, per capita, or just both sides should get 50%? It seems pretty clear they are making editorial decisions here. Does that break their section 230 protections?

Why specifically track political parties? Where is author_is_american? Or author_is_mayonnaise_enjoyer?

Maybe it was a choice made many years ago that they thought was appropriate, but we can't yet know it's not used for other purposes. We can at least be reasonably sure they've added the author_is_elon within the past year. I would have thought there would be many more descriptors, or non-controversial descriptors.

Or maybe Elon specifically added those before releasing this code to get people riled up.

You say it’s not nefarious but isn’t that how echo chambers are created?

Having a separate flag to track engagement specifically for Elon tweets isn't nefarious, but weird.

Did you not get the memo? "If you're not with us, you're against us".

It's probably more of a conservative/liberal identifier based on US political party ideals... And they likely would filter any metrics from this by the users country