After Elon Musk's acquisition of the social network Twitter (now X), concerns were raised that the new owner would use the platform for self-promotion and political campaigning. A new study has confirmed these suspicions — the algorithms of X now indeed "favor" two things: Elon Musk himself and Republicans.
Thus, Elon Musk and his platform X likely altered the algorithms to boost the visibility of his account as well as accounts of users with conservative views. This change probably occurred around the time Musk announced his support for Donald Trump in the presidential campaign. This is highlighted in a new study from Queensland University of Technology (QUT). It turned out that following this announcement, Musk's posts suddenly became much more popular.
The authors of the study — Digital Media Lecturer Timothy Graham from QUT and Communications and Media Professor Mark Andrejevic from Monash University — compared Musk's account activity before and after his endorsement of Trump in July. They found that starting July 13, his posts received 138% more views and 238% more retweets than before.
Musk demonstrated a higher growth rate in activity compared to the overall trends on the platform, the researchers note. They also discovered that other accounts with Republican viewpoints also experienced an increase in engagement, although to a lesser extent.
The results of the study align with findings previously published by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post regarding potential algorithmic bias of X favoring right-wing views. However, the researchers noted that they were limited by "relatively small amounts of data" since the platform had discontinued access to its academic API. They added that although they found no evidence of data loss, "there is no guarantee that all posts were collected."
Source: The Verge
Comments (0)
There are no comments for now