Jul 2, 2021 9:00 AM

You’ll Be Shocked by What’s in My Twitter Feed

Plus: The Twitternomics of promoted posts, Google’s updated code of conduct, and North America’s changing climate.

It’s almost July 4th and we’ve already had a long, hot summer. Looking forward to fireworks, beer, and brownouts.

The Plain View

Sitting at the top of my current Twitter feed is a “promoted” tweet displaying a thumbnail mosaic of self-described “flirty pics” about “Wives Who Took to Social Media About Marriage.” It links to a site called Nature World Today. Two tweets later comes another promoted tweet—yes, that’s a euphemism for “ad”—from Nature World Today itself. This one features Weird Moments You Would Never Expect to Experience While On Vacation. Three tweets after that, I encounter an ad from @365economist, urging me to click an article about “30+ People Who Have an Unreal Amount of Luck.” Pictured is a grinning guy on the edge of a bed with a hand on the thigh of each of the two attractive women sandwiching him. (They were clothed—for the moment.) “You’d be lucky if this happened to you even once in your life!” reads the text of the tweet.

I’m not feeling lucky. I’m feeling manipulated.

Lately, my Twitter feed has been inundated with chumbuckets. These are websites named after the low-value dead fish parts that seafarers toss in the water to draw more succulent aquatic fare to their nets. The name neatly captures the greasy and smelly nature of those virtual destinations. Some of them use eye candy to lure us in and then capture our personal information or send us to ads or websites lower on the food chain. Some of the ones I see on Twitter use lurid come-ons to drive me to sites with content on more mundane subjects like finance or history. There is an entire chumbucket industry, and the two leading distributors, after a failed merger attempt, are now going the IPO route. (First to market was Taboola, whose SPAC-powered stock market debut this week opened at a market cap of more than $341 million. Its rival Outbrain is expecting a $2 billion valuation.) Distinguished publications often display a collection of these outsourced links alongside actual editorial content, WIRED among them.

It’s one thing to have clickbait at the bottom of a web page and quite another to inject it smack into the center of a Twitter feed, where users are expecting links provided by accounts they’ve chosen to follow. “The beauty of the [feed] is the ability to fling through it quickly and yes or no to everything that goes by and then dive into something,” Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO at the time, once told me. But chum tweets disrupt that flow. Despite a line identifying them as promoted, our eyes go directly to the images and the headline. Sooner or later, after our clicks have led us to unwanted junk sites, we learn to regard our entire Twitter feed with more skepticism. (A different kind of skepticism, I should add, than the usual wariness of daft opinions offered by our fellow tweeters.)

God knows we need that skepticism, because chum tweets are impossible to ignore. They engage our reptile brain, triggering basic instincts that we can’t easily scroll past. These include sex, of course. The other day I got a tweet picturing a young woman in a bikini top warning me that “only mature audiences” should click to see the “unedited images” that await. Another is death—the obvious reason for our can’t-look-away fascination with what once-hot celebrities now look like in their golden years. And then there are the irresistible opportunities to gaze on the humiliations of others, in photos involving wardrobe calamities or weddings from hell. (Some years ago, the late and lamented site The Awl provided a hilarious taxonomy of chum.)

Once I noticed how frequently those tweets were showing up, my first thought was, can I turn them off? Twitter allows us to block individual accounts, but there’s no generic way to stop chum. The company does say that if we keep blocking examples of a type of ad, eventually the system will figure out that we don’t like seeing that entire genre and show less of it, but (a) that sounds like a lot of work and (b) it’s vague on how long that would take, if ever. I really wanted to talk to a Twitter executive about ad quality and whether the chum parade might be turning off users, but I did not have a lot of luck in realizing that request.

Twitter feeds can often be frustrating. Hordes of trolls hiding behind pseudonyms seem to get a kick out of drive-by insults or spreading vile misinformation. Despite this, I find it useful and often fun, and visit mine several times a day. But confronting chum makes me want to use Twitter less.

@Jack, make it stop!

Time Travel

In February 2015, I wrote a series of stories for Backchannel on “Twitternomics,” diving deep into the way the company makes its money. The first one talked about how the company developed Promoted Tweets:

The first Promoted Tweets in people’s timelines, which appeared in October 2011, came only from brands that users explicitly followed. These were tweets that people would have seen for free—the difference is that by paying to promote those posts, advertisers could guarantee that followers would be exposed to them. For example, if a follower of Red Bull checked his or her timeline five hours after the brand made a tweet, in normal circumstances that tweet wouldn’t be seen. By promoting the tweet, though, Twitter would fiddle with the chronology and include the ad among the first few tweets in the current timeline.

“We weren’t going to start by inserting content that you wouldn’t have ever seen,” says [head of the ad team] Kevin Weil. “These were brands you already followed. We started with that and we gauged user reaction.”

To everyone’s relief, there were no pickaxes and torches. “One of the first things we did was run a long-term retention study to understand whether people use Twitter less if they had a version with ads,” says [ad engineering lead Alex] Roetter. “And it turns out, they don’t. The behavior is the same.”

Ask Me One Thing

Tom asks, “When and why did Google abandon their ‘Don't Be Evil’ tagline? Would you say that they are evil now?”

Thanks for asking, Tom. Google hasn’t officially tossed “Don’t Be Evil” to the dumpster. But it certainly has relegated it to the basement. As you certainly know, for much of the company’s history, the phrase was the keystone of its ethos, featured in Larry Page’s first Letter to Shareholders. It meant Google would be “a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.” In Google’s original code of conduct, “Don’t Be Evil” were the first three words. But in the most recent version of the code, updated in September 2020, the phrase doesn’t appear until the very last line, almost as a throwaway: “And, remember … don’t be evil and if you see something you think isn’t right—speak up!” Unfortunately, when some Googlers have followed that advice, their input was less than welcome.

We’ve heard about a lot of misdeeds on the part of Google, including insufficient attention to sexual harassment, anticompetitive practices, and lax attention to algorithmic bias. Does this mean that Google is now evil? In my observation, most people who have joined Google were inspired by its former motto, and still care about living up to it, even as the company gets looser in its definition of righteousness. That’s why we are seeing vigorous pushback among the ranks when Google’s leaders fall short of that standard and stumble into the evil zone.

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

End Times Chronicle

Triple-digit temperatures in Portland, Seattle, and Billings, Montana. Lytton, British Columbia, logged 118 degrees. North America is officially sub-Sahara.

Last but Not Least

Health care, like everything else, is political. Case in point: “Medical liberty” has become justification for promoting unproven stem cell treatments.

Scientists have figured out how to use underground fiber optic cables to surveil human activities aboveground. Is it a coincidence that the US government is asking for billions to install more fiber?

Tim Berners-Lee, who didn’t get a dime for writing the World Wide Web, just sold his source code as an NFT for $5 million.

El Salvador is remaking itself as a Bitcoin haven. Can a whole country sell itself as an NFT?