Twitter Releases Study on Algorithmic Amplification of Content

Photo: Leon Neal (Getty Images)It’s a good day to be a mainstream politically conservative party or a right-leaning news outlet on Twitter. The company has released the results of a study analyzing algorithmic amplification of political content on the platform, which affirms what had already been suspected by some: The political right does really well on Twitter. Twitter’s study, led by the company’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team, or META, reviewed millions of tweets of elected officials in seven countries— Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the U.S.—as well as hundreds of millions of tweets containing links to articles from news outlets. In all countries except Germany, the company found that tweets posted by the political right were amplified more than those posted by the political left. When it comes to news outlets, the same thing occurred. (The company analyzed the links to content from news outlets, not tweets by the news outlets themselves). Right-leaning news outlets received more algorithmic amplification than left-leaning news outlets. Twitter didn’t classify news outlets as left-leaning or right-leaning according to its own criteria, but rather used a classification from third-party researchers.The study determined that certain political content is amplified on…
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