People from other countries, including Japan, which has the second largest user base for the platform after the US, notices strange changes to the site after Elon Musk’s recent take over of the company.
Below is a description of what has been happening from someone familiar with the Japanese twitter user base:
japan is the second biggest twitter user base after US so i thought it would be important to mention whats going on over there…..for a whole day multiple post on JP twitter have gone viral regarding an interesting phenomenon. they have found out that controversial and absurd political tags have completely vanished from trending suggestions. and now its filled with anime, idols and japanese tv shows news. these topics actually have over hundred thousands mentions yet they were being suppressed before. meanwhile way less popular things were constantly being shown on trending. lots of popular ids are mentioning this phenomenon. then a notorious japanese feminist journalist literally admitted that they were collaborating with twitter employees to select what to show or not. now she is sad that its not happening.
she is getting ratiod now.
the most strange thing is apparently they used to suppress anime and boost kpop related topics. now out of top 10, 5 trending topics is anime. rest are funny topics and drama shows. but it didn’t used to be like this. meanwhile if you searched japan on twitter, lots of the time you would get which korean band is performing in japan instead of actual japanese thing. its very strange. also lots of “gender theory” topic used to pop up. a post about how “elon musk has healed jp twitter” got over 100k likes.
Below is a screenshot and a translation from the Japanese feminist mentioned above, describing how she used to write articles, submit them to Twitter’s curation team to be picked as a trending topic, and how she is confused now that this process does not seem to work anymore:
Apparently, what has been trending on Japanese twitter in the recent days since Musk’s takeover (and firing of large numbers of Twitter’s staff) has been just topics people genuinely care about, and not topic being pushed for whatever other reason by the platform. There are Japanese users to the site happily describing Musk’s takeover of the platform and the ensuing changes as “bringing peace” or the site itself “being healed”:
Discussions of this phenomenon has brought forth twitter users from other countries who noticed similar occurrences, and a discussion ensued on 4chan. For an anon from India, they stated:
>403469705
Same shit here. All the anti government, anti majority and pro Muslim shit disappeared overnight.
For someone from Poland, they noticed that topics related to Ukraine was no longer being pushed:
>and boost kpop related topics
same happened in poland with anything regarding shitkraine.what a vile fucking runt you have to be to shill other country in yours
These trends have aroused the curiosity of an anon from the UK, who wonders:
>Twitter makes Shitkraine trend
I’m seeing a pattern here. Leftists from any country collaborate with lefty Twitter HQ, and local Twitter lefties promote whatever lefties care about in that country.
For Japan it’s of course making anime not popular, for you it’s promoting Shitkraine, I wonder what’s it in my country.
Others seem generally hopeful of the recent changes:
Old twitter: natural topics suppressed from trending, niche topics forced open by repeated dilation
New twitter: natural topics bursting forth in trending, niche topics healing over
…
Whatever it is, it’s anti-British. Anti English propaganda. (in response to the above British person’s comment)
…
The post algorithm internet is going to be glorious
Lastly, an American anon chips in, stating something similar have happened a few years ago, when twitter’s algorithm was being tweaked and hence not working on the site. What he observed on that day was as follows:
Same thing happened on English language twitter a few years ago. The censorship was offline while team twat was “tweaking the algorithm.” For just one day you got to see the actual most popular hashtags, which were “Trump”, “America”, “Jesus”, “March Madness” and something to do with a movie or something. Millions of tweets and it was nothing but positivity. It was strange and beautiful.
Sure enough, the censorship kicked back in and the “trending” tab was nothing but hebrew vitriol. #NeverTrump “trending” with 300 tweets and #Jesus with millions of tweets is nowhere to be found. I’m lazy right now, but someone could probably find it with the wayback machine.
One last rather creepy trend people have noticed on Japanese Twitter:
Twitter was, and still is, a very powerful social media platform whose reach spans across the world. It seems the old curator team on Twitter had a great amount of power on which topics they may choose to suppress, and which to artificially push onto the general public. Pushing korean pop music in Japan or Islam in India was downright bizarre, considering the animosity between these particular cultures. They definitely had great political influence that they freely inflicted, and dare I say, abused, upon the world’s population.
I wonder if similar sorts of changes have been happening on the English version of the Twitter site after Musk’s takeover, and more importantly, whether these changes will stick or if they might be replaced with a different set of censorship algorithm. One can only wait and observe in the upcoming days, but for now, these changes seem welcoming and hopeful.
Original screencap of what has been happening on Japanese Twitter, and the 4chan discussions on it:
Temple of Zagan 