Study suggests X turned right just in time for election season

[Pollypocket]

Significant uptick in visibility for Musk, Republican account posts from July 13

 

 pair of researchers say they've determined that July 13 was likely the day that X, formerly known as Twitter, made platform-level algorithm changes that increased the visibility of posts made by Elon Musk and Republican-leaning accounts in the run-up to the US election.

 

That date may stick out in the memory as when Elon Musk, now the owner of X, formally endorsed Donald Trump in the recent US presidential election.

Coincidence? Perhaps not, according to a working paper shared by Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic of Queensland University of Technology. The pair examined posts made by Musk, Republican-leaning accounts, and Democrat-leaning accounts between January 1 and October 25, noting that July 13 appeared to be the day the tide turned red on X.

 

Their research was split into two phases, one looking at the prominence of Musk's posts pushed to users through features like the default "For You" feed, and the other comparing the prominence of Republican- or Democrat-aligned posts.

 

Graham and Andrejevic observed an increase in all metrics for Musk's posts on the platform from mid-July onward. These included views, retweets, and favorites.

Equally, the pair add, Republican-leaning posts were found to have enjoyed a more significant boost in terms of their visibility to users, and engagements were also vastly higher than those on Democrat-leaning posts, although both sides saw fairly even increases. 

[Quentin67]

Well yeah, it was like Cambridge Analytica + Facebook back in the day which everyone pinky swore would never happen again.

Elon and his ilk messed with the algorithm big time so more right-leaning posts and stories would get through to people's feeds.

[Rebecca1990]

Tech companies will tell you that their algorithm is a black box and they aren't even completely sure what it does.

This is an lie.

They very much decide what does and does not get traction on their platforms and this absolutely affects the perspective of not just their users but also the rest of society as those users will interact with others.

[Sarah77]

Twitter's algorithm is actually relatively simple; the basic structure is a prediction engine that tries to assign probabilities to certain events coming out from you seeing a post (do you reply?, click it?, etc.). It then applies a score to each of those events, multiplied by that predicted probability, and decides based on that whether this is a good post to show you. (An obvious example being trying to predict if you'll report a post, which provides a strong negative contribution to the final score, so posts you're likely to report are less likely to be shown to you)

All you need to hack it is just to add constant terms not multiplied by anything, like "did Elon musk post this or reply to it?" and you can skew the result easily.