Elon Musk thinks he knows why your X feed might be getting more toxic

Elon Musk suggested X users share posts of puppies so their feed doesn’t become too toxic.

Elon Musk shed light on why some users might be seeing “more toxic” content on their X feed of late.

The X owner wrote in a post Sunday night that the X algorithm “assumes” users want to see more of the same type of content they interact with.

“One of the strongest signals is if you forward X posts to friends, it assumes you like that content a lot, because it takes effort to forward,” Musk wrote.

He added: “Unfortunately, if the actual reason you forwarded the content to friends was because you were outraged by it, we are currently not smart enough to realize that.”

Musk later responded to a user’s post that suggested people share posts of puppies “so your feed doesn’t become too toxic.”

“True. I was just with some friends who were saying that their feed had become more toxic lately,” Musk wrote. “Turns out they had been sharing examples of toxic posts with each other, which makes the algorithm think you love toxic posts.”

Social media platforms, including X, use machine learning recommendation algorithms to predict the content users want. X recommends posts that appear on a user’s feed in the “Search” section, the “For You” feed, as well as advertising.

A blog post by X from last year says its recommendations are based on candidate sourcing, ranking, and applying “heuristics and filters.” It will recommend relevant posts for a user by taking about 1,500 posts from “hundreds of millions” of candidate sources, half of whom a user follows.

It will then use an AI system to rank those sources’ posts based on past interactions such as likes, retweets, and replies. After this stage, X will filter out posts based on your preferences, including removing posts from accounts a user has blocked, NSFW content, or posts a user has already seen.

Last November, Musk said on X that it was rolling out a “major update” to its recommendation algorithm that would help “surface smaller accounts and posts” outside a users’ network.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17, made outside normal working hours.