X 17+

I love that X doesn’t censor like Facebook, and isn't trying to flood me with sale ads and commercials like Instagram or TikTok. Everyone has the right to speak their mind, and theres no favoritism in the algorithm. I do feel like the news and trends could be better— the tabs are a bit confusing. Id love a local news tab, and I’d like to see the important stories of different states in the country, and especially news of our government— laws being passed, bills being proposed— the good stuff that impacts me as a person and us as a nation. I also feel like there should be a space on X that facilitates citizen interaction and encourages checkmark participation. If you are a government official, using social media for engagement or outreach, there should be a Q&A section or something engaging with The People… We have never been so close, yet so far… There is a huge disconnect. Every voice is lost in the sea of comments— and many of the comments are spam or bots…. X has to do a better job at keeping scammers out, so the real people can be heard, and discussions can be had…. We want to create change— but everyday people, the masses, aren’t seen… X can change that.

I always really liked Twitter but it was annoying when it started turning ugly with so much angry trolling years ago. Then they implemented a bunch of controls to help make it sane and calm again. Then it became X and now it’s a big giant loud and rude contest again. And that should be fine - I get that it’s a public forum and In don’t really care who owns the platform - but the good thing about it has always been my ability choose my follows and fine tune my feed. But no - logging in defaults to a generic feed that has all kinds of crummy loudmouth negative opinions from people formerly banned from the platform right up top. You have to hit one more button to get to your follows feed. So annoying. And it would be one thing if they were just using an analytic algorithm to lead me to this I might enjoy but they’re not. They’re putting things they know I’ll have to drive reactions which is just rude. I even get alerts whenever the company’s current rude owner posts another dumb opinion - one more thing I didn’t ask for and don’t want. And they just made likes private. Like used to be a good tool to find more accounts to follow organically. Now it’s some creepy fake privacy meant to separate people even more and cut non corporate funding avenues for support. I just plain don’t enjoy this app experience. Keep the corny new name if you insist but change the general interaction functionality back to like 2012 settings and I’ll love it again.

I love getting to know about the news and discussing important issues and topics with a truly wide and diverse audience. Now that Twitter has made the decision to forego all political campaign money for the sake of trying to protect our democracy in the face of existential threats posed by weaponized, automated messages targeted at individuals based on data about us that’s harvested and sold to those wanting to manipulate us, I’m an even more enthusiastic user.

I wish I would occasionally see intelligent discussion around a different point of view politically but Twitter‘s algorithms don’t really continue to show that kind of content to someone on either side of the political fence. I think it is important to help us understand people of other political viewpoints to continue to show us Content from across the spectrum. Not the nutty stuff, but based around good journalism articles from a reliable publication that leans the other way. The algorithms follow our preferences and sort us. Also I wish the algorithms would serve up fact check content regularly from a variety of reliable fact-checkers, like The Lead (which I think is graphically excellent, just interspersed in every users newsfeed, whether clicked on or not. Keep the facts before us all.