While this is “nice”, I guess, I also can’t fathom how naive this generally seems.

X is a proprietary black box and X/Musk can change the algorithm literally at will, what they show which persons and when and when not. There is NO time ever where users have have any control over it, and to perform a statistical analysis on a blackbox is also kind of pointless in this case because the blackbox can change randomly, at any point in time, possibly right after the analysis has concluded, or right before.

For example if this study comes to the conclusion that there was no manipulation during the time of the study, that’s meaningless because it could have been before and it could happen afterwards. If it comes to the conclusion that there was manipulation at a certain time, then X can always claim that they’ve already “fixed” the issue and then it’s again a new black box and no one knows when the next manipulation is being activated.

The ONLY solution to this is to ONLY use open source platforms where not a single company or host is able to do what they want with the complete service. Or in other words, the only solution is to avoid X and other proprietary social media platforms like the plague that they are.

I really don’t get why people are so naive when it comes to proprietary online services. It’s almost as if they like being screwed over.