Does X’s Algorithm Push Politics to the Right?
In the age of social media, the most powerful political actor in the room may not be a politician at all. It may be an algorithm. For years, critics have warned that social media feed algorithms amplify outrage, fuel polarization and distort democratic debate. Yet hard evidence has been elusive. A landmark study conducted with Meta during the 2020 US election found that turning off Facebook’s algorithm had no measurable effect on users’ political attitudes. But then what happens when the algorithm is on?
In “The political effects of X’s feed algorithm”, recently published in Nature, Germain Gauthier (Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University), Roland Hodler (University of St.Gallen, Switzerland), Philine Widmer and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya (both of Paris School of Economics) report the results of a large-scale field experiment conducted in 2023 on Elon Musk’s platform X, formerly Twitter. Their conclusion: activating X’s algorithm does shift political attitudes systematically, and toward more conservative positions.