I thought it was interesting how it explicitly doesn't boost independents. So much of the two-party system is self-reinforcing.

So many questions. How are users tagged D or R? Is that a manual process or automated somehow? What is the effect of these tags? Can I find out if my Twitter account is in one of those buckets?

I suspect that these are used for metrics tracking rather than being fed back into the recommendation engine. But there's no real way to know for sure given the limited release. These predicates aren't actually used anywhere in the code that's been made available.

It's not that shocking...

Half the people that got promoted on my timeline were perpetually candidates for elections I couldn't vote in, and they _self-identified_ as Republican or Democrat in their own bios, or via the registration of their candidacy...

This is why I exclusively used to use Twitter in the "people I follow only" mode, and simply shut my account down when they pushed harder on the algorithm.

Facebook guesses your political affiliation as well, you can even look über your settings to see what they guessed.

The repo suggests it's about tracking engagement metrics[0], so Team Red people see more Team Red content and vice versa. Nothing nefarious.

[0]https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...

Exactly. I don't see NPA (no party affiliation) anywhere.