Twitter discovers its algorithm favors conservative opinions

revealed Twitter says its algorithm promotes right-leaning content more than left-leaning content. But the reasons for this are still not clear. The results are derived from study An internal review of the computational amplification of political content.

During the study, the company searched through millions of tweets posted between April 1 and August 15, 2020.

The tweets were from news outlets and elected officials in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

In all of the countries studied, with the exception of Germany, the company found that right-leaning accounts receive more computational amplification than the political left. I also found that right-leaning content from news outlets benefits from the same bias.

The company says it does not know why the data indicates that its algorithm favors right-leaning content, noting that the question is difficult to answer because it is the product of interactions between people and the platform.

However, it may not be a problem specifically with the algorithm. Steve Rathjee, who studies social media, published his findings explaining how divisive content is likely to spread around foreign political groups.

“In our study we were also interested in the type of content being amplified via social media and found a consistent trend,” Rathjee said. Negative posts about foreign political groups tend to receive much more engagement on Facebook and Twitter.

In other words, if a Democrat is negative about a Republican (or vice versa), this type of content usually receives more engagement.

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Twitter: Right-wing content gets more computational amplification

If Rathjee’s research is taken into account, this means that the right-leaning posts on Twitter provoke more outrage, amplifying them.

Perhaps the problem with Twitter’s algorithm has more to do with the promotion of toxic tweets than a specific political bias. The company’s research said Germany was the only country that did not see the bias of the right-leaning algorithm.

It could be linked to Germany’s agreement with Facebook, Twitter and Google to remove hate speech within 24 hours. Some users even change their country to Germany via the platform to prevent Nazi images from appearing.

The platform has been trying to change the way it tweets for a while. In 2020, it began testing a feature that would warn users when they were about to post a rude response. This year, I also started experimenting with a message that appears when you think you’re in a heated platform battle.

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