The Deceptiveness of Social Media's 'Social' Aspect.

Social media, we've all used it for years now. We've become accustomed to it being a great way to communicate, and be connected with, people from all walks of life, religions, political views, and other varied backgrounds. Yet, behind the scenes, social media always has those with an agenda to promote. Two big sites, Facebook and Twitter, have definitely been pushing theirs in recent times. Countless numbers of people on the outside-the-mainstream right-wing and left-wing have been censored, ghost banned, filtered out, or completely banned on their services. All bans, at least of more known people, have been well documented elsewhere.

Specifically on Twitter though, their "new" quality filter, has been rolled out to all users. A filter which has been available for celebrities and well-known 'media' figures for a while now. The purpose of this filter is questionable with "account origin" being the biggest red flag. Given Twitter's obvious social and political slant, their filter is clearly being used to filter out certain opinions and views. This, paired along with sentiment (aka behavior), and you can see that they're using their algorithms to filter out more informative tweets. They're limiting the interactions between those of certain political, social views and those that are 'influential' on the service.

In effect, it's practically a 'bubble' or echo chamber for these individual accounts, the "royalty" of Twitter. As hand-picked by Twitter themselves. And it's very likely that you, who is reading this, has been selectively affected by this filter at one time or another. Just look at your analytics and you'll probably notice that your  Tweet impressions have gone down. If you support Sanders, you're selectively filtered out. If you support Trump, you're selectively filtered out. If you say anything that Twitter's "cultural environment" finds disagreeable, you're increasingly filtered out.

From Wikipedia's Entry about Social Media

Then there's the filtering out of trends. Numerous times, trending topics on Twitter, mainly against the Democratic Party and/or HRC, have disappeared from the list and the autocomplete on Twitter. This is no fluke, bug, or accident. These are active decisions made in the background on Twitter. It's all a part of the illusion of open discussion on Twitter. They don't want open discussions. They don't want the free spread of information. They want to limit what's seen by the wider, and typically lesser informed, user base on Twitter. And your filtering out, along with certain trends on a selective basis, is a part of that censoring.

Furthermore, on the illusion of the openness of Twitter, you have celebrity and various other 'media figure' accounts that seem to be all about interacting with their fans and followers. The hard truth is, they don't care about what you say. They don't care about your support of them. Yes, sure some celebrities do interact directly with fans on the platform and are the only ones using their account, but that's a minority. Most of them have their assistants handle the job for them or social media companies doing the interaction for them. They also have had the Quality filter on for a long time. Not to mention the "Only people you follow" filter enable under Notifications. When you think a celebrity, singer, or whoever is not seeing your tweets @ them, it's not the case of missing your tweets. They're completely ignoring all of their fans using the filter settings and, to put it bluntly, couldn't care less about the praise from their fans. Given the rare times, if ever, that they do reply it's because an assistant is using Twitter's search to find mentions, in an effort to keep up the illusion of interacting with their fans. Meanwhile, you'll always seem them replying to other "famous people". Interactions which are phony, rehearsed, and done to contribute to this illusion. All for the aid of their career and nothing more. They don't care about you at all, only the $$. Which is the same thing with Twitter itself. You're the product being sold and limiting your ability to interact improves their  ability to cash in off your micro-content aka tweets.

For the celebrity, the personality, the internet famous, their fame is empty on social media. It's about feeding egos and catering to the most influential and of the 'correct' political, cultural, and social views. They too are the product being sold. Only they've got the perk of being able to use the platform to be compensated by companies for advertising their products, if they chose to. Something that most others don't have the privilege of having the influence to take advantage of. They're being fooled into thinking that they're more important than they really are. All of us on social media are being fooled into thinking that we're more important than we really are. And Twitter makes good $$ off of it.

The social aspect of social media is a complete illusion and we've all seen the negative effects its had on people. Ask yourself, does social media make those you know in real life truly closer? No. I've seen the opposite effect. Are social media platforms, such as Twitter, a positive thing that brings people together? Hell no. Social media is a divisive lie and is anything but social. Maybe it's time for all of us to slowly walk a path away from services like Twitter. Either that, or completely alter the way we interact on the site and only interact in a positive manner.

To be honest though, it's better to just eventually walk away from Twitter as its ship slowly sinks.