The magazineScienceThe experiment, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University with a study group of 1,000 people, explains how these individuals can have a profound impact. They divided the participants into two subgroups and, throughout the 2024 US presidential campaign, showed half of them the unaltered "For You" page of X, while the other half were exposed to a barely detectable filter that reduced the presence of polarizing news. The researchers then measured political tension and found that the first group's tension increased by two points on a scale of zero to one hundred. This is where Captain Lettuce comes in, because it demonstrates, once again, that small changes can be powerful. The authors emphasize that the group whose news feed was altered did not notice any difference from how it appeared. It wasn't that they were playing the violin and the air smelled of roses instead of the usual stinking mud that X has become lately. However, the way they referred to political opponents did change noticeably. According to the study's authors, this change induced by the slightest modification is roughly equivalent to three years of polarization, based on the general level of tension.
Anticipating the hypothetical response Musk will never give, the authors stated that, indeed, a slight dip was detected in the fundamental metric that governs any social network: the time spent on it. But they asserted, on the contrary, that the number of "likes" and shares was then higher. In other words, perhaps they were losing minutes of mindlessly scrolling through thescroll Infinite, but the dwell time was of higher quality, which should interest advertisers. But Musk doesn't really want the money. He knows he'll be the first billionaire in history. X is, above all, his perverse ideological toy.
