That Musk illustration originated here on Lemmy! I wish I could find the original post, but it was an art student who submitted it for something, and posted here for feedback.

Please excuse my French, but the US administration should do what it’s best at and suck France’s collective, throbbing cock.

While this is "nice", I guess, I also can't fathom how naive this generally seems.

X is a proprietary black box and X or L.Ron 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 an online service blackbox is also kind of pointless because the blackbox can change randomly, at any point in time, possibly right after the analysis has concluded, or right before. I mean it's not like the blackbox is in your hands so that you can actually study inputs/outputs and get consistent results. Every time you visit any X URL, there's potentially a fresh blackbox version deployed to you (you don't know and you can't know). That makes it rather pointless IMHO. And it's just as pointless to believe what X claims about these issues. Of course they'll always claim that they don't manipulate. And you can never prove or disprove it, because of a complete lack of control over it from the user's end. So they can do what they want, as long as they do it sneakily enough that no one notices.

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 happened 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. Because communication should not be controlled by any big company.