While reality may have a liberal bias, Twitter does not.
A Twitter study and accompanying blog post, published Thursday, show that the company’s algorithm tends to favor right-leaning news outlets and right-wing political parties. In other words, long-disputed claims of anti-conservative bias on social media couldn’t be further from the truth.
How does this right-wing content amplification show up? Well, according to the study, users need look no further than the Home timeline — i.e., the Twitter timeline not displayed in reverse chronological order. That timeline uses an algorithm to help inform what users see, and therein lies the problem.
“Content on Twitter’s home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms,” explained the study. “By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others.”
And those amplified messages tend to trend a very specific direction.
The study, which in part examined tweets from political parties in seven countries (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the U.S.), found that in “6 out of 7 countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.”
This point was important enough to be called out by Rumman Chowdhury, who works as the director of Twitter’s META (machine learning ethics, transparency, and accountability) team in a long and detailed Twitter thread.
Notably, Twitter researchers do note an important Trump-sized caveat.
“However,” they cautioned, “when making comparisons based on the amplification of individual politician’s accounts, rather than parties in aggregate, we found no association between amplification and party membership.”
The study authors also found that the bias toward right-wing amplification on Twitter isn’t limited to political parties, but also applies to news outlets.
“Consistent with this overall trend, our second set of findings studying the U.S. media landscape revealed that algorithmic amplification favours right-leaning news sources.”
So why is this amplification happening?
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“Here’s what’s complex: The team did phenomenal work identifying *what* is happening,” wrote Chowdhury on Twitter. “Establishing *why* these observed patterns occur is a significantly more difficult question to answer and something META will examine.”
