TWITTER ACKNOWLEDGES ITS ALGORITHMS AMPLIFY RIGHT-WING MATERIAL

Sat 23 October 2021:

According to an internal study, Twitter’s algorithms are amplifying more conservative and right-wing content.

Conservative politicians’ tweets were magnified more than liberal politicians’ tweets in nearly every country studied, according to Twitter.

Meanwhile, right-wing news outlets were amplified more than left-wing news outlets for Twitter users.

According to the study, Twitter users who choose to read information on their “home” page based on the platform’s algorithms rather than reverse-chronological order see more political postings.

Officials from Japan, Canada, and the United States, as well as politicians from four European countries — France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom — were evaluated.

Only German Twitter users saw more content from left-wing sources than stuff from right-wing sources.

Meanwhile, right-wing politicians in the United Kingdom were substantially more likely than left-wing politicians to have their tweets seen by a larger number of people.

However, Twitter stated that amplification was based on political opinions and problems rather than specific parties.

“We used public, third-party sources — such as official institutional websites — to identify political party affiliation,” Twitter said in a blog post.

“We did not use Tweet content to attempt to infer political views of elected officials.”

Rumman Chowdhury, Twitter’s Director of Software Engineering, said that algorithmic amplification could have an “adverse” effect.

“Algorithmic amplification is problematic if there is preferential treatment as a function of how the algorithm is constructed versus the interactions people have with it,” she said in the blog post.

“Further root cause analysis is required in order to determine what, if any, changes are required to reduce adverse impacts by our Home timeline algorithm.”

The latest from META — an analysis of algorithmic amplification of tweets from elected officials in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, UK, & US.

The team: @fhuszar, @s0f1ra, Conor O’Brien, @__lucab, @sagemintblue @mrtz. 1/nhttps://t.co/1RcTw5Rcbd

— Rumman Chowdhury (@ruchowdh) October 21, 2021

Due to privacy concerns, Twitter has said that it will make its research available to third parties but not its “raw data.”

“We believe it’s critical to study the effects of machine learning on the public conversation and share our findings publicly,” Twitter said.

“This effort is part of our ongoing work to look at algorithms across a range of topics,” the company added.

“We hope that by sharing this analysis today, we can help spark a productive conversation with the broader research community to examine various hypotheses for why we are generally observing comparatively more right-leaning political amplification of elected officials’ content on Twitter.”

(with agency)

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