Jonathan Liew says X rewards fake content over discourse

Jonathan Liew argues that X has become a machine for manufacturing attention rather than a forum for reliable public talk, and he opens with a simple demonstration: the platform recently circulated a wave of football “quotes” that never happened. Posts attributed to high-profile figures—including Tottenham striker Richarlison, outgoing Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, Liverpool defender Andy Robertson and TV pundit Gary Neville—were widely shared despite being fabricated, according to Liew’s Guardian column.

The problem, in his telling, is not merely that misinformation exists, but that the interface and ranking system steer users toward it. Liew writes that X pushes content people did not ask for, and that watching a video can funnel a user into unrelated clips—street brawls, arguments and talkshow confrontations—because the product is built to keep the scroll moving. Elon Musk, he notes, regularly updates and publishes changes to the platform’s algorithm, and Liew describes a scoring system that evaluates posts across multiple engagement metrics such as likes, shares and replies. He adds that when a reply provokes a response from the original poster, a bot can mark it as a “debate” and boost it, making contention itself a promotion trigger.

Liew links that design to the kind of topics the feed tends to surface: highly polarising culture-war and geopolitical flashpoints, alongside evergreen anger-bait such as VAR. He also cites research suggesting the algorithm “stymies” meaningful discourse while amplifying provocative and false content. One study he references, published in February 2024, randomly assigned 5,000 active X users to either the algorithmic “for you” feed or a chronological feed. Users shown the “for you” feed, he writes, were more likely to prioritise policy issues associated with Republicans—such as inflation, immigration and crime—and more likely to adopt a pro-Russia stance on the war in Ukraine.

That combination—cheap fabrication, frictionless distribution, and a ranking system that rewards the most combustible reactions—creates a predictable workplace for anyone trying to use X professionally. Liew says he deleted his own account in 2024 and now only visits occasionally via a burner account for work. The implication is not that a single CEO has “ruined” a platform through personality, but that the product is now tuned to harvest the easiest metric signals at scale, and that those signals are produced most reliably by outrage, tribal cues and synthetic content.

The football quotes that never existed were not niche propaganda; they were the kind of low-effort posts that ride on recognisable names and spread before anyone has a reason to check. Liew’s point is that on X, that is not a bug that needs fixing so much as a format that the feed knows how to sell.