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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
Dec 26, 2022 • 14 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatnik soup I'll theorize what's happening with Twitter after Elon took over. As with all social media platforms, Twitter's algorithm is their best-kept secret and there is very little public information available on it.

1/14
Like other social media algorithms, Twitter's is probably powered by a machine learning (ML) components which means that it's constantly changing its behavior. It gets "training data" from the 900 million daily tweets posted on the platform.

2/14
Social media ML algorithms are extremely complex, and engineers from Google and Facebook have said that they sometimes have hard time understanding their own ML algorithms:

vice.com/en/article/y3p…

3/14
On 24 Mar, 2022, when Musk was still planning the purchase, he held a poll about making the whole algorithm open source:
I very much doubt that this will happen - there are two elements that make a social media platform successful:

4/14
1) its algorithm, and 2) critical mass to make the platform lively.

So how does Twitter prioritize content? Instead of ordering tweets chronologically, it shows tweets dynamically based on various factors - who do you follow, whose tweets you've been reading, etc.

5/14
If you read some of Max Blumenthal's or Lauren Boebert's tweets out of curiosity, Twitter may show you more of this type of content. It of course prioritizes tweets from people you follow, but sometimes it makes these "detours" that change your Twitter feed.

6/14
Now, a bit of theorizing: I think that the algorithm was changed after the Russian invasion so that it would prioritize Ukraine-related content. This content was seen more often, gained more exposure, likes, re-tweets, etc.

7/14
This theory is supported by my own data, showing that engagement dropped by around 40%. This phenomenon was also supported by other, much more popular people:

8/14
I would also imagine that some more strict rules for prioritizing content related to COVID-19 were integrated during the first year of the pandemic. This was - based on my theory - done to control the spread of disinformation related to the pandemic.

9/14
So, I don't believe that Twitter started suppressing Ukraine-related content, but removed its prioritization instead.

Also, I don't think the Twitter Blue does anything yet, as Julia Davis, who saw a drastic drop in engagement, already has it.

10/14
Of course it's up to Twitter to decide if they want to boost specific type of content or not - as a private company they can "take sides" if they want as long as they follow the law.

One of the first promises of Elon was to get rid of Twitter's bots ...

11/14
... but the problem is not the bots, but the organic troll farms. Actual people are propagating and spreading state- and corporation-sponsored areas en masse, and these troll armies use brigading, spamming and spreading of disinformation as their weapons.

12/14
In one of my earlier soups I predicted that disinformation will spread faster and wider with the changes that Musk has made. I think that the more recent changes and Elon's tweets reinforce this prediction. Many known disinfo spreaders have also been reinstated on Twitter.

13/14
Elon hasn't made any comments about troll farms either, probably because it's such a huge problem that it's almost impossible to tackle.

My related soups:

Troll farms:
Manipulation:
Twitter Files:

14/14

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Vatnik Soup Profile picture
May 11
In this 9th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss “legitimate military targets”. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, with no declaration of war, hiding behind a “special military operation”. Yet vatniks & useful idiots pretend Russia has any legitimate or lawful targets in Ukraine.

1/8 May 6, 2026, Sumy, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine Russian drones hit a kindergarten in central Sumy. Two women were killed and seven injured. Photo: Suspilne Sumy
Russia started the war in 2014 by seizing Crimea with unmarked soldiers, “little green men”. Russians have been waging an undeclared, illegal war with endless war crimes ever since, whether it’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children with genocidal intent…

2/8
… the concentration camps for Ukrainians under occupation, conscripting Ukrainians from occupied territories, or the terrorist, deliberate bombing of civilians, including their infamous “double tap” strikes.

So no, Russia does not have any “legitimate targets” in Ukraine.

3/8
Margarita Simonyan, head of Putin’s state propaganda media RT: “We are bombing everyday.”
Read 8 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
May 1
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American streamer and millionaire. He’s best known for his champagne socialism, rabid criticism of the US and Israel, support for the Soviet Union and for Chinese and Russian invasions, and for mistreating his dog.

1/20 Hasan Piker in Havana, Cuba
Born in 1991, Piker grew up in a privileged and well-connected environment. His father held senior roles at big corporations and his uncle, Cenk Uygur, is the founder of The Young Turks media network. He graduated cum laude from Rutgers, a top-tier university in New Jersey.

2/20 Image
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His main activity and primary source of income consists of hours-long livestreams on Twitch where he comments on news and yells at videos. He also keeps his dog in place the whole time with a shock collar.

3/20

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Read 21 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Apr 26
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.

Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.Image
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:

Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
Read 4 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Apr 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.

1/20 Image
Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.

2/20 Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.

3/20 Greek PM Alexis Tsipras appoints radical economist to new government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/greek-pm-alexis-tsipras-economist-yanis-varoufakis
Read 20 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 29
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.

1/7 A flight of French and Polish Rafale and F-16 fighter jets above a NATO flag during the opening of the exhibition “Powerful because we are united”, dedicated to the 19th anniversary of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to NATO (OTD 22 years ago), in the bastion of the Vilnius defensive wall on March 29, 2023 (OTD 3 years ago) in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”.
2/7 Trump aides struggle with how to spend $500 billion more on military, Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/21/trump-hegseth-budget-military/
Trump calls for US military spending to rise more than 50% to $1.5tn https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy59kxl2xwzo
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To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.

3/7 Newsweek falsely claiming that the US pays 68% of NATO’s budget. The real number is 15%.

Elon Musk falsely claiming that the US pays for 2/3 of European defense. In another post he claimed it was 1/4. Both made-up numbers. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870903805845598428 https://x.com/i/birdwatch/t/1870903805845598428
NATO has annual budgets and programs worth around EUR 4.6 billion in 2025 (representing 0.3% of total Allied defence spending), and up to EUR 5.3 billion in 2026. The US share for 2026-2027 is 15% of that: 0.8 billion. Source: Funding NATO https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/funding-nato
Read 7 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 9
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.

1/20 Image
War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.

But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:

2/20
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Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.

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Read 20 tweets

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