In the months following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, my experience with the platform (and perhaps yours too) got quickly, dramatically worse. My algorithmic timeline, better known as the “For you” tab, devolved into a broken fire hydrant of tweets from blue-checked engagement farmers, shameless meme thieves, clout-chasing Republican politicians, and pseudonymous YouTubers posting weird, uncanny rage-bait. For a brief period, X even made “For you” the default setting, nudging users toward this slurry of boosted content and away from a simple chronological feed of posts from the accounts they chose to follow.
As a result of these changes, anytime I opened the app and neglected to select the chronological feed, I was not really experiencing Twitter as I’d previously experienced it, or wanted to experience it; I was using a new and different version of Twitter that a reactionary billionaire thought I ought to see instead. Eventually, I stopped using the site, which Musk rebranded as X, because I perceived the platform (whatever the name) as feeding me a steady diet of right-wing slop, and I did not want to upset my stomach any further.
Today the site’s basic mechanics remain weighted toward feeds that incorporate some form of algorithmic input. The “For you” tab still appears to over-index on Musk’s posts and perspectives. The “Following” tab defaults to ranking posts by their popularity, which can make it very challenging to try and follow breaking news stories on the app. Finally, a dropdown menu allows users to adjust the “Following” tab to display more recent posts first, which, of the available options, most closely approximates the Classic Twitter experience.
A recently published study from a team of researchers in Europe attempts to measure the degree to which X’s algorithm is poisoning the brains of those who continue to use it. The study, which took place in 2023, randomly assigned around 5,000 X users to view either their algorithmic or chronological feeds over a seven-week period, and then measured the effects on users’ political attitudes and online behavior.
For anyone who does not have a vested interest in the financial success of X, the findings are pretty grim. The researchers found that the “For you” tab shifted users’ political opinions toward more conservative positions on certain issues—for example, the then-ongoing criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They found that the algorithmic feed increased user engagement, promoted conservative-coded political content, and demoted posts from traditional news sources, which appeared in users’ algorithmic feeds 58.1% less often than they did in users’ chronological feeds.
Finally, and maybe most troublingly, the researchers found that these effects were asymmetric—that although turning the algorithm on changed users’ views, turning it off did not move views in the other direction. After the study, the chronological feeds of participants the study exposed to the algorithm contained 60% more posts from conservative accounts and 28% more posts from conservative political activists, relative to the chronological feeds of study participants who did not use the algorithmic feed. The researchers attribute these results to the types of accounts that users encountered in the “For you” tab and eventually chose to follow, thus adding those accounts to their chronological feeds, too.
In other words, once the X algorithm moves you to the right, you probably stay there. And if you use the X algorithm long enough, even on those occasions when you decide to peruse the “Following” tab, you will probably see more conservative-coded content than you would have if you had never checked out the “For you” tab in the first place.
The researchers noted that the algorithm’s persuasive effects were stronger among self-identified Republicans and independents than among Democrats, whose views the researchers describe as “largely unaffected” by the experiment. But even if X’s design choices are not turning unwitting liberals into brainwashed MAGA dead-enders overnight, the implications for democracy remain, to say the least, troubling.
A 2024 Pew survey found that among social media platforms, X had the greatest proportion of users (59%) who said they used it to keep up with politics. Another Pew survey from the same year found that about two-thirds of X users utilized the platform to follow the news, and that half said they got news from X “regularly.” Again, X stood out from its competitors—TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram—as the only platform for which a majority of users listed “keeping up with news” as a reason they used the site.
Against this backdrop, the results of the study suggest that the segments of X’s user base that are more open to conservative ideas are also likely to be in the market for political content when they doomscroll. Similarly, depending on which tab they decide to browse, X users looking for news might be less likely to encounter news reported by actual journalists, and more likely to encounter mendacious agitprop designed to make them angry at Democrats, afraid of immigrants, and/or sympathetic to Donald Trump.
Part of the reason influential conservatives so loudly profess their trust in X these days is that right-wing echo chambers make them feel comfortable: X’s algorithm amplifies content that soothes their egos, affirms their priors, and inexorably pushes them further to the right.
Around the time that Musk was taking over at Twitter, he said he wanted to build a “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” platform on which “a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” In the time-honored fashion of conservative culture warriors masquerading as principled champions of free speech, he also said that the platform must be “politically neutral,” which, he noted, would entail “upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
The reality was simpler and much more grotesque: Musk, who dove headlong into Republican politics shortly thereafter and remains the platform’s most-followed trafficker in conspiracy theories embraced by white supremacists, wanted the platform to both reflect and promote his worldview. The study helps quantify the success of this effort: Over the past four years, Musk has transformed X into a disinformation-ridden radicalization machine that occasionally spits out AI-generated nonconsensual pornography, too. If those are things you want from your social media experience, X is serving your interests more capably than ever. If they’re not, X is doing its best to change your mind every time you give it a chance.
