- It sure seems like Twitter is more likely to show content from Republican or right-wing accounts.
- That's the conclusion from two new reports in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
Is X, the service many of us still call Twitter, more likely to show users political posts from Republicans, or right-leaning accounts?
Yes. Probably.
That's the conclusion from two different deep dives published in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
Next question: Is Twitter doing this intentionally, at the behest of owner Elon Musk?
That one is harder to answer.
Both questions matter, obviously, because we're a week away from the US presidential election. And while Twitter has become a financial disaster under Musk's ownership, it still remains an important news hub for many millions of people.
Meanwhile, Musk, who used to support Democrats, has thrown himself completely behind Donald Trump's campaign. He says "Democracy is over" if Trump loses.
Neither the Journal nor the Post want to draw a direct line between Musk's politics and Twitter's operations. But there are certainly some suggestions of dotted lines. I've asked Twitter for comment.
The details: Both papers used software to analyze what users see on Twitter. The Post looked at a year-plus of tweets from top congressional accounts; the Journal created 14 brand-new Twitter accounts, controlled by bots and spread throughout the US.
The Post's conclusion: Tweets from congressional accounts across the spectrum are getting less attention than they did a year ago. But Republican tweets are much more likely to go viral than Democrats.
The Journal's findings don't exactly sync with the Post. It finds that its theoretical new users, who told Twitter they are not interested in politics, saw their feeds clogged with political content anyway. And while it says Kamala Harris' campaign was the most-seen account, the platform skewed right overall: "Ten of the other top 14 most-seen leaned right, including Trump's, and overall, pro-Trump content appeared about twice as frequently as pro-Harris material."
What accounts for the right-leaning shift? Neither paper wants to say definitively. But they both hover around two possibilities, which aren't mutually exclusive:
Theory 1: Twitter is showing users what users want to see.
That's the argument Musk makes himself. And there is decent logic behind it. For starters, even before Musk bought Twitter, its own researchers found that the "political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left" on the platform.
And it's entirely plausible that some left-leaning users have left the platform during Musk's ownership, in part because he reinstated accounts from right-leaning users, including Trump himself. Conservatives may also be flocking to it for the same reason.
And those users may be more likely to engage with right-leaning content, prompting the site's algorithm to show them more of it — the same way all social media sites generally work with popular content.
Theory 2: Twitter is showing users what Musk wants them to see.
This is a notion that some current and former Twitter users believe, though there's no direct proof that it's the case. But there is plenty of precedent for it, since Musk has repeatedly moved the platform according to his whims in the past.
Most famously, Musk ordered engineers to highlight his own tweets after the 2023 Super Bowl, as Platformer's Zoe Schiffer has reported.
Musk has also used the site to host interviews with political figures he's interested in, including a buggy chat with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023, and one with Trump this summer.
The Post also reports that "More recently, Musk complained that a fraction of users saw his livestreams," and compelled his engineers to promote those chats on the site."