• by Colin Kirkland , January 6, 2025

X is planning changes to its algorithm. According to a post by app owner Elon Musk, the company will try to promote more “informational/entertaining content” in order to combat “too much negativity.”

Despite Musk's fear-inciting and often harmful panoply of posts over the past two years, the billionaire entrepreneur is pledging to “maximize unregretted user-seconds” regardless of how negative content technically grows user time on social-media apps.

Musk's announcement comes a week after he urged his followers to “please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform,” with no mention of how his personal posts have driven millions of users to open new accounts on competing apps like Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, and even resulted in a temporary app ban in Brazil.

Not three days after announcing algorithm changes, Musk used X to attack Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour government over its response to grooming gangs in the U.K., triggering an attack on the government as he posted that minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison.”

While X -- formerly known as Twitter -- has a reputation for being overwhelmingly “negative,” at least in terms of users' verbal attacks and heated discussions within the app, Musk's takeover in 2022 saw a significant rise in hateful content (often promoted by Musk himself) that led to a massive boycott of advertisers, frightened away users, inspired the launch of competing apps like Meta's Threads, and tanked the company's revenue intake.

Along with the tech billionaire's hypocritical pleas for more positive content, the announcement for an algorithmic tweak may also involve “easy ways for you to adjust the content feed dynamically, so you can have what you want at any given moment,” according to Musk's post.

Like every other major social-media platform, X is readjusting to push video and entertainment experiences within their feeds -- a user experience made massively popular by TikTok, which has impressed users and brands with a powerful algorithm that provides people with an endless supply of user-specific video content that could easily be described as “informational/entertaining.”