X is changing its recommendation system after its product chief said the platform had failed to use a basic social signal: whether two users follow each other.
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said in a post on Monday that the company’s algorithm had been missing data used to surface posts from “mutuals,” meaning accounts where both people follow each other. Bier said the change should increase the visibility of a user’s posts to those mutual follows.
That sounds small. On a social network, it is not. A mutual follow is one of the clearest signals that two people have some existing relationship, or at least a shared willingness to hear from each other. If that signal is absent or underweighted, a feed can drift toward posts from strangers that generate engagement, including the sort of argument bait that makes a timeline feel less like a community and more like a bar fight with pagination.
Bier did not say how the data went missing, how long the problem existed, or whether the issue affected all users. He also did not give numbers on how much more often mutuals’ posts will appear after the change.
What the change actually does
According to Bier, the tweak is meant to “boost visibility” among users who follow each other back. In recommendation terms, that means X is giving more weight to the social graph instead of relying as heavily on other engagement signals that can reward viral posts from people a user has no relationship with.
X has not published a technical explanation of the failure. The company has not said whether the missing signal was caused by a data pipeline problem, a ranking change, an experiment, or some other failure in its recommendation stack. For users, the practical effect is easier to understand than the missing postmortem: more posts from people they chose to follow, fewer posts from random accounts selected because the system thinks they will provoke a reaction.
The admission also lands after another recent change Bier described last week. He said users who post original material will “climb faster” on the platform. Bier also acknowledged that some leading accounts on X have been posting recycled or stolen material from other users.
Taken together, the two statements point to the same product problem: X’s incentives have been rewarding the wrong behavior, or at least behavior the company now says it wants less of. One change is aimed at who sees your posts. The other is aimed at what kind of posts get promoted.
The missing detail is accountability. Bier has described the intended fixes, but X has not explained how a social network of its size lost or ignored a basic mutual-follow signal in the first place. Until the company says more, users are left with the usual platform bargain: trust the tweak, refresh the feed, and see whether the arguments get any quieter.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
