The online safety bill could cause Twitter to flatline

We now know that when the government's new Online Safety Bill comes into force, it could mean a potential jail sentence for tech bosses who don't take proper steps to keep children safe.

- MARC BURROWS

Platforms that ignore flags from Ofcom to tackle children's exposure to content such as self-harm, eating disorders or suicide could face two years in prison. So, what does this mean for Elon Musk and Twitter?

I can give you my insight: I worked for the social media platform for seven years as a content curator. I was responsible for helping explain what's going on and amplifying content that did precisely that. To understand the ramifications the new bill will cause Musk, we need to look at the reason young people are being served this content to begin with.

Twitter runs two separate timelines on its apps, now called "For You" and "Following", defaulting to the former. "Following" is fairly clear - it's a linear feed of posts, replies and retweets by people you have opted to follow, presented in the order in which they were sent. It's a real-time snapshot; essentially it's what you signed up for.

"For You", which until recently was known as the "home timeline", is different. It sorts posts from people you follow and serves you the ones you're likely to be most interested in first, with the algorithm making those choices based on who you interact with most regularly. You'll notice that's not all you get, however that same algorithm uses your engagements and settings (and the engagements of others in your network and accounts it deems similar to yours) to serve you a selection of tweets from people you haven't chosen to follow as well. This is content it assumes you're going to like.