Twitter is now displaying tweets from accounts that users do not already follow in their timelines. The company revealed that it is now surfacing recommendations to all of its users, including those who had previously avoided them successfully.
“We want to ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform, so we’re expanding recommendations to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past,” the company wrote in a tweet.
It’s unclear how many more recommendations users can expect to see in their “home” timeline, or whether Twitter is making recommendations more visible in other areas of the app as well.
In its tweet, the company referenced a September blog post that stated that “recommendations can appear in your Home timeline, certain places within the Explore tab, and elsewhere on Twitter.”
For the time being, it appears that recommendations will not appear when viewing the “latest” timeline, which sorts tweets chronologically and has historically not included tweets from accounts that aren’t already followed.
We want to ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform, so we’re expanding recommendations to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past.
You can learn more about them, and how to best control your experience: https://t.co/ekYWf57JSc
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 30, 2022
Anecdotally, it appears that some users are already reporting noticeable changes to their timelines, including the appearance of new topic suggestions and a large number of tweets from seemingly random accounts.
In a tweet from its support account, the company advised one irritated user to return to the chronological “latest” timeline to avoid the influx of recommended content.
Though the change may appear abrupt, it isn’t the first time the company has experimented with increasing suggested content. Twitter has been pushing recommendations into various parts of its service for years, though the frequency with which these suggestions appear has fluctuated.
Twitter has previously stated that it excludes certain types of content from recommendations in order to avoid amplifying potentially harmful or low-quality content, though it is unclear if this is still the case.
There is no longer a communications team at the company. The curation team, which was in charge of elevating content across Twitter, was also laid off as part of the company’s mass layoffs.
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Elon Musk, Twitter’s current CEO, hasn’t always been complimentary of the platform’s recommendation algorithms. He tweeted in May that using the app’s “latest” timeline was critical to “fixing” Twitter’s feed.
“You’re being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you’re not aware of,” he explained at the time. Musk, who has previously stated his desire to open source Twitter’s algorithms, has yet to comment on the new recommendation expansion or how the feature works.
