That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were racists, bigots, and extremist political content.

Oh, and the owner's account.

Even if you believe that Musk and team don’t “touch the scales” of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from engagement at all levels.

The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.”

Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described.

Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and fantasizing about race wars.

The discussion over X is always the same:

"It's gone to hell"

"No, it just reflects your tastes"

"That's objectively false: create a new account and see what happens."

"..."

I find this a bit disingenuous.

If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option.

Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.

A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's definitely a network effect issue.