Twitter’s Machine Learning Algorithms Amplify Tweets From Right-Wing Politicians Over Those on the Left
25th October 2021
A team of engineers working on Twitter’s own ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) unit scraped millions of tweets of thousands of elected officials from seven different countries: US, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, and France. They tracked how likely these posts made between 1 April 2020 and 15 August 2020 were to be placed in a higher rank in users’ personal Twitter feeds using Twitter’s algorithms.
Tweets posted by politicians from right-wing parties were amplified more than those from left-wing parties in all countries except Germany. The effect was strongest for Canadian and British politics. For example, content from UK Labour MPs was amplified 112 per cent as opposed to the 176 per cent amplification of Conservative MPs’ content; and Canada’s Liberal party politicos were amplified 43 per cent versus 167 per cent for the Canadian Conservative party.