Study: Twitter’s algorithm favors the political right
Twitter is getting more transparent with its users
Amplification of right-leaning news
In acknowledgment of the fact that tweets from elected officials represent only a small portion of political content on Twitter, the researchers also looked at whether the algorithm disproportionately amplifies news content from any particular point on the ideological spectrum.
To this end, they measured the algorithmic amplification of 6.2 million political news articles shared in the US. To determine the political leaning of the news source, they used two independently curated media bias-rating datasets.
Similar to the results in the first part of the study, the authors found that content from right-wing media outlets is amplified more than that from outlets at other points on the ideological spectrum.
This part of the study also found far-left-leaning and far-right-leaning outlets were not significantly amplified compared with politically moderate outlets.
While this is a very large study which draws pertinent conclusions, there are some things we need to be aware of when interpreting the results. As the authors point out, the algorithms might be influenced by the way different political groups operate. So for example, some political groups might be deploying better tactics and strategies to amplify their content on Twitter.
It is pleasing to seeTwittertaking the initiative to carry out this kind of research, and reviewing the findings. The next steps will be to gather more detailed data to understand why their algorithm might be favoring the political right, and what they can do to mitigate this issue.
Article byShoaib Jameel, Lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence,University of Essex
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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