Stefan Mileschin

New study claims “leftie” bias is a myth

Social notworking site Twitter’s algorithm might be accused of having a left-wing political bias by conservatives, but a new study says it favours right-wingers more.

Twitter commissioned a study to understand whether their algorithm may be biased towards a certain political ideology. While Twitter publicised the findings of the research in 2021, the study has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS.

The study looked at a sample of four per cent of Twitter users who had been exposed to the algorithm (46,470,596 unique users). It also included a control group of 11,617,373 users who had never received any automatically recommended tweets in their feeds.

A computer model allowed the researchers to generate their findings. The researchers found that in six out of the seven countries (Germany was the exception), the algorithm significantly favored the amplification of tweets from politically right-leaning sources.

Overall, the amplification trend wasn't significant among individual politicians from specific parties, but was when they were taken together as a group.

The starkest contrasts were seen in Canada (the Liberals' tweets were amplified 43 per cent, versus those of the Conservatives at 167 per cent) and the UK (Labour's tweets were amplified 112 per cent, while the Conservatives' were amplified at 176 per cent).

https://fudzilla.com/news/54298-twit...-right-wingers