Twitter Is Rolling Out Recommended Tweets To Everyone – SlashGear

Twitter first introduced recommendations on the timeline back in 2014, according to The Guardian. The original iteration of the recommendation service initially focused on new users, with the platform presenting content and accounts, seemingly in an effort to make the platform easier to use and boost user retention. The changes to Twitter’s recommendations now make it so that even older accounts that tweet often will receive recommended tweets.

According to Twitter, the algorithm analyzes content you’ve interacted with in the past, as well as the content the people you regularly interact with are interacting with, including things like retweets, likes, and comments. Twitter calls these analytics and signals, and the algorithm uses these signals to decide which content you might want to see or are more likely to interact with. This method of content recommendation is a bit of a double-edged sword in many cases — while it can help the platform grow and encourage user engagement outside of echo chambers, it can also drive division and promote negativity.

As a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed) found, most people are more neurologically activated by negative content, and since negativity is somewhat subjective — especially when it comes to controversial topics like politics — the logic follows that argumentativeness is more likely. Fortunately, there’s a button on the top of the Twitter timeline that lets you choose between top tweets and new tweets.