Internal research reveals that Twitter amplifies the right content

An analysis conducted in 7 countries shows that tweets posted by conservative parties and media are in the most prominent positions. The company said it does not know the cause of this phenomenon

(Photo by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto) Twitter is skewed to the right, according to new research conducted and disseminated by the same microblogging platform in recent days. Social media amplifies tweets from right-wing politicians and content from conservative news outlets more than left-wing ones.

Twitter said it made this discovery while exploring how its algorithm recommends political content to users , but admitted he still doesn't know why these findings.

The study looked at millions of tweets from politicians in seven countries - Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK and the UK - and hundreds of millions of tweets of links from news outlets. The content dates back to the period between April 1 and August 15 last year and to decide whether it came from the right or left, Twitter used labels produced by external analysts.

The researchers then used the data to see which tweets were amplified more on an algorithmically sorted feed than on a chronological feed, the two ways Twitter users have to set the first timeline. In six out of seven countries - all except Germany - traditional parties and right-wing media outlets enjoyed higher levels of "algorithmic amplification" than their left-wing counterparts.

Rumman Chowdhury, director of Twitter's Meta (machine learning, ethics, transparency and accountability) team, said in a company blog post that the company's next step is to find out the reason behind this. phenomenon. A subsequent analysis will try to understand if the cause of this imbalance is the way users interact with Twitter or if it is the algorithm itself.

Researchers have pointed out in advance that the difference in amplification could be due to to the "different strategies" used by political parties. Those on the right may simply be better at sharing their ideas on social media or mobilizing their supporter base.

Scholars also said the findings do not suggest that Twitter's algorithms pushed "extreme ideologies more of traditional political voices, ”another common concern voiced by Twitter critics. In addition, according to Chowdhury, Twitter has created a system to share the data used for its work for validation by the scientific community. In this way it will allow both the privacy of its users and the possibility for researchers to replicate the study.


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Topics

Politics Social media Social Networks Twitter globalData.fldTopic = "Politics, Social media, Social Networks, Twitter "

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