A study by the Media Research Centre (MRC) found that Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) algorithm promotes left-leaning media and punishes most right-leaning media.
MRC is Reviewed After studying 62 media outlets across the political left, center, and right, Elon Musk’s X social media platform was found to be “overwhelmingly supportive of left-wing media,” with approval ratings for the 30 left-wing media outlets surveyed increasing by 100%, while approval ratings for the 23 right-wing media outlets surveyed decreasing by 74%.
“Elon Musk has done some housecleaning to turn X into a free speech platform,” said Dan Schneider, MRC’s vice president of free speech. “The changes have been incredible, but some of the ghosts of the Jack Dorsey era, with its continued election interference, need to be cleared away.”
MCR noted that X’s AI tool, Grok, explains that X uses a “reputation” score to determine “the likelihood and visibility of a user’s content to be recommended to others” – a reputation score that presumably intentionally favors left-leaning media under X/Twitter’s previous leadership.
When MRC researchers asked Grok for an explanation, the AI chatbot replied, “The minimum Tweepcred is [Reputation] “Twitter requires a score of 65 to be recommended,” it states, indicating that accounts with a lower score will not be recommended.
Additionally, Grok added, “Accounts with higher Tweepcred scores are more likely to have their posts seen by a larger audience, while accounts with lower scores may have their posts deprioritized by the platform’s algorithms.” In the case of media, there is a clear trend for X to give conservative media lower reputation scores, resulting in less boost and engagement compared to left-leaning media, which is boosted based on reputation score.
In studying the X algorithm, MRC said it used a previously published methodology to determine a score for each media outlet, examining media outlets from a list provided by AllSides, which categorizes media outlets based on their political affiliation from “right-wing” to “left-wing.”
The MRC noted that the study follows two earlier studies which found that X’s algorithm favours left-leaning media.
The initial investigation found that X promoted social media posts from Democrats in Congress and suppressed posts from Republicans ahead of the 2024 elections.
A second study found that X’s algorithm favored Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), possibly helping Harris reach a broader base of supporters in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
As MRC’s Dan Schneider pointed out, X’s algorithmic bias — and inevitable election interference — may not be the fault of Musk, who still has significant work to do to clean up the code and algorithms left over from the site’s Twitter days.
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