The political effects of X's feed algorithm

https://werd.io/the-political-effects-of-xs-feed-algorithm/

by benwerd • 5 months ago

82 97 5 months ago

werd.io

rbanffy2• 5 months ago

And this is why the price for Twitter was, in the end, remarkably low.

cowpig• 5 months ago

dark

piloto_ciego2• 5 months ago

Yeah, this was always the play looking back in hindsight. Like, I didn't get it, "why would you pay that kind of money for a web forum?!" It wasn't the forum that was important, Twitter (for better or worse) has wormed it's way into the fabric of American discourse. He was basically buying the ideological thermostat for the country and turning the dial to the right.

dlev_pika• 5 months ago

This is even worse outside of NA. In many countries it is the de facto communication channel of government and businesses.

RetpolineDrama2• 5 months ago

Or from the other perspective: Meta and Google have had their finger on the scale for more than a decade (along with old twitter).

In twitters case, you had regime officials directing censorship illegally through open emails and meetings.

It's no surprise that the needle moves right when you dial back the suppression of free expression even a little bit (X still censors plenty)

0ckpuppet• 5 months ago

as opposed to the government funding turning it to the reality bending left? There was direct communication from Senators and members of Congress directing twitter to block and ban based on certain topics. And Twitter obliged.

barfiure• 5 months ago

This person is confused. Trump was a well known pussy grabber for decades. Epstein was anything but a secret, it seems, given how many politicians and celebrities and moguls he rubbed elbows with. Jerry stopping by the island for a lemonade and a spot of lunch with his high school aged girls? Yeah.

It comes down to this: you can have visibility into things and yet those in power won’t care whatsoever what you may think. That has always been the case, it is the case now, and will continue to be in the future.

jongjong2• 5 months ago

This is a defeatist attitude. Don't know what bubble you're in but these official revelations are driving real change in mine. It's kind of subtle at this point but it's the kind of change that cannot be undone.

Herring3• 5 months ago

Unfortunately speed often matters when it comes to outcomes. Eg if you get a cancer diagnosis like Jobs, you probably shouldn’t waste a year drinking juices and doing acupuncture.

arwhatever• 5 months ago

I deleted my account after many years when X recently made the Chronological Feed setting ephemeral, defaulting back to the Algorithmic Feed each time the page is refreshed.

No away I'm going to let that level of outrage-baiting garbage even so much as flash before my eyes.

socalgal22• 5 months ago

I just click "following" at the top and never see anything I didn't ask to see. It resets once every few months to the other tab which I assume is just the cookie setting expiring.

dagelf3• 5 months ago

Train it: I just have to spend 3 minutes every other year to tap the 3 dots on every post and choose "Not Interested", for an epic feed unmatched anywhere.

quirkot2• 5 months ago

Train the algorithm so that you can be the sort of product you want to see in the world

mikepurvis2• 5 months ago

"We need more funding into open protocols that decentralize algorithmic ownership; open platforms that give users a choice of algorithm and platform provider; and algorithmic transparency across our information ecosystem."

This sounds like a call to separate the aggregation step from the content. Reasonable enough, but does it really address the root cause? Aren't we just as polarized in a world where there are dozens of aggregators into the same data and everyone picks the one that most indulges their specific predilections for engagement, rage, and clicks?

What does "open" really buy you in this space?

Don't get me wrong, I want this figured out too, and maybe this is a helpful first step on the way to other things, but I'm not quite seeing how it plays out.

bee_rider• 5 months ago

I’d hope people wouldn’t intentionally pick the political extremism feed if they had any other option (although it’s hard to say).

tarxvf• 5 months ago

From where I'm sitting, it seems obvious people do exactly that.

iamnothere2• 5 months ago

I will note that political extremists can have more interesting content at times, and it’s good to see what they are up to in case it will affect you. They also sometimes surface legitimate stories that are kept out of the mainstream press, or which are heavily editorialized or minimized there. But you definitely have to view all sides to gain an accurate view here, it would be a mistake to read only one group of extremists. And it’s almost always a mistake to engage with any of them.

Aurornis• 5 months ago

I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

So changing your feed to show popular posts on the platform instead of just your friends’ Tweets would be expected to shift someone’s intake toward the average of the platform.

SecretDreams3• 5 months ago

Is this the result of a feedback loop from musk joining or did they just accelerate the overall decline of the platform with him joining? Some might say it was going this way even before he picked it up, but it was certainly an inflection point when he joined either way.

All modern social media is pretty toxic to society, so I don't participate. Even HN/Reddit is borderline. Nothing is quite as good as the irc and forum culture of the 2000s where everyone was truly anonymous and almost nobody tied any of their worth to what exchanges they had online.

bpodgursky• 5 months ago

The moderation changes absolutely changed posting behavior. People got banned for even faintly gesturing the wrong direction on many issues and it frightened large accounts into toeing the line.

tokyobreakfast2• 5 months ago

Even HN/Reddit is borderline.

It's the proliferation of downvoting. It disincentivizes speaking your honest opinion and artificially boosts mass-appeal ragebait.

It's detrimental to having organic conversations.

"But the trolls" they say.

In practice it's widely abused.

Using HN as an example, there are legitimate textbook opinions that will boost your comment to the top, and ones that will quickly sink to the bottom and often be flagged away for disagreement. Ignoring obvious spam which is noise, there is no correlation to "right" or "wrong".

That's one advantage old-school discussion forums and imageboards have. Everyone there and all comments therein are equally shit. No voting with the tribe to reinforce your opinion.

What's worse is social media allowed the mentally ill to congregate and reinforce their own insane opinions with plenty of upvotes, which reinforces their delusions as a form of positive feedback. When we wonder aloud how things have become more radicalized in the last 20 years — that's why. Why blame the users when you built the tools?

excalibur• 5 months ago

I don't know what changes have been made more recently, but I know there was a definite change to the Twitter algorithm a few months ago that filled the feeds of conservatives with posts from liberals and vice versa. It seemed to be specifically engineered to provoke conflict.

noelsusman• 5 months ago

I'm not sure what your point is. How is "being exposed to X's current user base instead of their old followers" not equivalent to "turning on the feed algorithm"? You doubt the effect is due to the algorithm, but your alternative explanation describes exactly what the algorithm does.

TiredOfLife• 5 months ago

When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

Do you have any numbers. In my experience it's still majorly communists

thrance• 5 months ago

Open the front page in a private tab. Most posts are far right conspiracy theories, ragebait or grifts.

Look at that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504404

jongjong2• 5 months ago

Oh my. Now that X is affecting people's politics (for the better IMO), suddenly people care about the influence of algorithms over politics...

beanjuiceII• 5 months ago

yep but you wont find common sense on the matter here unfortunately

GorbachevyChase• 5 months ago

I am shocked, shocked to find that there is social engineering in this establishment!

fluoridation2• 5 months ago

I honestly don't understand how or why people are using Twitter to keep up with the news. The only thing I use it for is to follow artists, and even that has been going down in recent weeks with most of my favorites moving over to BlueSky. Maybe I'm just a long-winded idiot, but the character limits barely let me have a conversation on either platform. How are people consuming news like this?

It just baffles me how different my experience of using the platform is. I literally do not see any news. I'm not entirely convinced that it's Twitter being biased and not just giving each person what they most engage with.

rishabhaiover• 5 months ago

It used to be self-expression in an oddly entertaining way but that Nikita Bier ruined the whole thing with his metrics chasing algorithmic shifts.

joe_mamba• 5 months ago

I honestly don't understand how or why people are using Twitter to keep up with the news.

Because the MSM news stations themselves pick up the stuff from twitter and just add their own spin flavor. A dozen phone videos from random citizens on-site is always quicker than the time CNN/FOX can send a reporter there. On twitter you at least get the raw footage and can judge for yourself before MSM try to turn it political to rage bait you.

stevage• 5 months ago

You follow artists, and they are not tweeting their political opinions? Cool.

I gave up on Twitter when everyone I followed kept adding politics. Even if I agreed with it, I just don't want to a marinade in the anger all day.

fluoridation2• 5 months ago

The one exception I think of is the guy from Technology Connections, who I stopped following because I got tired of seeing him in my feed complaining about something or other. And I've noticed he's been putting that into his videos as well, so I might have to do it on YouTube as well.

Flere-Imsaho• 5 months ago

My feed (UK based) seems to give me the major news stories well before the mainstream (BBC), and I'm taking days if not weeks in some cases. Now it could be that's how the mainstream decides to cover a particular story? What's worrying is when a story is all over X but isn't covered.

To give an example, the recent protests in Iran where being covered on X but the BBC was silent for weeks before finally covering the story (for a few days).

dylan6042• 5 months ago

Could it also be that "mainstream" news are actually trying to verify information and/or obtain confirmation from other sources? All of that is done in an attempt to avoid promoting false information. People tweeting do not do any of that

ppeetteerr• 5 months ago

Why anyone is still using X after 2025 is a mystery (I know, it's where everyone is, but the moral implications are wild)

spankalee2• 5 months ago

Seriously. The CEO is opening posting white supremacist content like it's Stormfront. If you don't support that, you should get out.

Herring3• 5 months ago

I don’t know which country you’re in, but in the US Trump won the popular vote. Plenty of people here are perfectly happy with Stormfront.

haunter• 5 months ago

Live update for sport events. People post highlights and replays before anyone else.

dagelf3• 5 months ago

I didn't get it either until I trained the algorithm to feed me what I want by just clicking the three dots and selecting Not Interested on anything I never wanted to see again... it listens, whats left is really unmatched anywhere, I've really looked, and occasionally still do out of curiosity.

apparent6• 5 months ago

Lots of info is shared there first. It shows up in news articles and podcasts 12-24 hours later. Not everything shared there is true, of course, so one has to do diligence. But it definitely surfaces content that wouldn't show up if I just read the top 2-3 news websites.

jmugan2• 5 months ago

Oddly enough, X is the only platform i've been able to teach to not show me culture war stuff, from either side. It just shows me AI in the "For You."

kypro2• 5 months ago

The uncomfortable truth to most "the algorithm is biased" takes is that we humans are far more politically biased than the algorithms and we're probably 90% to blame.

I'm not saying there is no algorithmic bias, and I tend to agree the X algorithm has a slight conservative bias, but for the most part the owners of these sites care more about keeping your attention than trying to get you to vote a certain way. Therefore if you're naturally susceptible to cultural war stuff, and this is what grabs your attention, it's likely the algorithm will feed it.

But this is far more broad problem. These are the types of people who might have watched political biased cable news in the past, or read politically biased newspapers before that.

quirkot2• 5 months ago

the issue brought up in the article isn't that "the algorithm is biased" but that "the algorithm causes bias". A feed could perfectly alternate between position A and position B and show no bias at all, but still select more incendiary content on topic A and drive bias towards or away from it.

PaulHoule2• 5 months ago

I've been pretty consistent about telling Bluesky I want to see less of anything political and also disciplined about not following anybody who talks about Trump or gender or how anybody else is causing their problems. I see very little trash.

jmugan2• 5 months ago

Maybe it has gotten better recently. I tried and tried with Bluesky, but it would not abide.

guywithahat• 5 months ago

I have the same thought, my X algo has become less political than HackerNews. I suppose it depends on how you use it but my feed is entirely technical blogs, memes, and city planning/construction content

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 5 months ago

You have to find good people. Bad people will find you.

cyrusradfar4• 5 months ago

Lovely thought Ben. Good to hear from you!

I spent a lot of my life and money thinking about building better algorithms (over five years).

We have a bit of a chicken / egg problem. Is it the algorithm or is it the preference of the Users which is the problem.

I'd argue the latter.

What I learned which was counter-intuitive was that the vast majority of people aren't interested in thinking hard. This community, in large part, is an exception where many members pride themselves on intellectually challenging material.

That's not the norm. We're not the norm.

My belief that every human was by their nature "curious" and wanting to be engaged deeply was proven false.

This isn't to claim that this is our nature, but when testing with huge populations in the US (specifically), that's not how adults are.

The problem, to me, is deeper and is rooted in our education system and work systems that demand compliance over creativity. Algorithms serve what Users engage with, if the Users were to no longer be interested in ragebait, clickbait, focused on thoughtful content -- the algorithms would adapt.

socalgal22• 5 months ago

It is not the norm here either.

stetrain2• 5 months ago

Is it the algorithm or is it the preference of the Users which is the problem. I'd argue the latter.
Algorithms serve what Users engage with

User engagement isn't actually the same thing as user preference, even though I think many people and companies take the shortcut of equating the two.

People often engage more with things they actually don't like, and which create negative feelings.

These users might score higher on engagement metrics when fed this content, but actually end up leaving the platform or spending less time there, or would at least answer in a survey question that they don't like some or most of the content they are seeing.

This is a major reason I stopped using Threads many months ago. Their algorithm is great at surfacing posts that make me want to chime in with a correction, or click to see the rest of the truncated story. But that doesn't mean I actually liked that experience.

cyrusradfar4• 5 months ago

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Curious about this. Don't have an angle, just trying to survey your perspective.

You shared: > People often engage more with things they actually don't like, and which create negative feelings.

Do you think this is innate or learned? And, in either case, can it be unlearned.

sonofhans• 5 months ago

Algorithms serve what Users engage with, if the Users were to no longer be interested in ragebait, clickbait, focused on thoughtful content -- the algorithms would adapt.

Algorithms have been adapted; they are successful at their goals. We’ve put some of the smartest people on the planet on this problem for the last 20 years.

Humans are notoriously over-sensitive to threats; we see them where they barely exist, and easily overreact. Modern clickbait excels at presenting mundane information as threatening. Of course this attracts more attention.

Also, loud noises attract more attention than soft noise. This doesn’t mean that humans prefer an environment full of loud noises.

rl33• 5 months ago

This community, in large part, is an exception where many members pride themselves on intellectually challenging material.

That's not the norm. We're not the norm.

I recommend against putting HN on a pedestal. It just leads to disappointment.

cyrusradfar4• 5 months ago

It's true -- I do enjoy this community even though it's failed to serve my every thought with the love that I surely deserve!

wtp1saac• 5 months ago

It is interesting to see a general bias taken away from the study, which I wouldn't necessarily guess given my own experience. My X "For You" feed mostly does not read pro-Trump - instead mostly pushing very intense pro-European and pro-Canadian economic and political separation from the USA, and pushing very negative narratives of the USA, although I suppose it occasionally also introduces pro-Trump posts, and perhaps those do not sway me in the same way given I am a progressive American.

That said, the Trending tab does tend to push very heavy MAGA-aligned narrative, in a way that to me just seems comical, but I suppose there must be people that genuinely take it at face value, and maybe that does push people.

Less to do with the article:

The more I think about it, I'm not really even sure why I use X these days, other than the fact that I don't really have much of an in-person social life outside of work. Sometimes it can be enjoyable, but honestly the main takeaway I have is that microblogging as a format is genuinely terrible, and X in particular does seem to just feed the most angry things possible. Maybe it's exciting to try and discuss opinions but it is also simultaneously hardly possible to have a nuanced or careful discussion when you have limited characters, and someone on the other end that just wants to shout over you.

I miss being a kid and going onto some forums like for Scratch or Minecraft or whatever. The internet felt way more fun when it was just making cool things and chatting with people about it. I think the USA sort of felt more that way too, but it's hard to know if that was just my privilege. When I write about X, it uncomfortably parallels to how I would consider how my interactions have evolved with my family and friends in real life.

kettlecorn• 5 months ago

Underrated in X's changes is how blue checkmark users are shown first underneath popular tweets. Most people who pay for blue checkmarks are either sympathetic to Musk's ideology or indifferent. Many blue checkmark users are there to make money from engagement.

The result is underneath any tweet that gets traction you will see countless blue checkmark users either saying something trolling for their side or engagement-baiting.

The people who are more ideologically neutral or not aligned with Musk are completely drowned out below the hundreds of bulk replies of blue checkmarks.

It used to be that if you saw someone, like a tech CEO, take an interesting position you'd have a varied and interesting discussion in the replies. The algorithm would show you replies in particular from people you follow, and often you'd see some productive exchange that actually mattered. Now it's like entirely drivel and you have to scroll through rage bait and engagement slop before getting to the crumbs of meaningful exchange.

It has had a chilling effect on productive intellectual conversation while also accelerating the polarization of the platform by scaring away many people who care about measured conversation.

bool3max• 5 months ago

I automatically tune out any blue checkmark post or reply and just assume it's an LLM responding to earn $.003

kypro2• 5 months ago

I really wish these points were made in a non-political / platform-specific way because if you care about this issue it's ultimately unhelpful to frame it as if this is an issue with just X or conservatives given how politically divided people are.

I do share the author's concerns and was also concerned back in the day when Twitter was quite literally banning people for posting the wrong opinions there. But it's interesting how the people who used to complain about political bias, now seem to not care, and the people who argued "Twitter is a private company they can do what they want" suddenly think the conservative leaning algorithm now on X is a problem. It's hard to get people across political lines to agree when we do this.

In my opinion there two issues here, neither are politically partisan.

The first is that we humans are flawed and algorithms can use our flaws against us. I've repeatedly spoken about how much I love YouTube's algorithm because despite some people saying it's an echo chamber, I think it's one of the few recommendation algorithms which will serves you a genuinely diverse range of content. But I suspect that's because I genuinely like consuming a very wide range of political content and I know I'm in a minority there (probably because I'm interested in politics as a meta subject, but don't have strong political opinions myself). But my point is these algorithms can work really well if you genuinely want to watch a diverse range of political content.

Secondly some recommendation algorithms (and search algorithms) seem to be genuinely biased which I'd argue isn't a problem itself (they are private companies and can do what they want), but that bias isn't transparent. X very clearly has a conservative bias and Bluesky also very clearly has political bias. Neither would admit their bias so people incorrectly assume they're being served something which is fairly representative of public opinion rather than curated – either by moderation or algorithm tweaks.

What we need is honesty, both from individuals who are themselves seeking out their own bias, and platforms which pretend to not have bias but do, and therefore influence where people believe the center ground is.

We can all be more honest with ourselves. If you exclusively use X or Bluesky, it's worth asking why that is, especially if you're engaging with political content on these platforms. But secondly I think we do need more regulation around the transparency of algorithms. I don't necessary think it's a problem if some platform recommends certain content above other content, or has some algorithm to ban users posts content they don't like, but these decisions should be far transparent than they are today so people are at least able to feed that into how they perceive the neutrality of the content they're consuming.

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

Earlier source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064130)

apparent6• 5 months ago

What does it mean to have someone on a chronological feed, versus the algorithmic one? Does that mean a chronological feed of the accounts they follow? I hardly ever use that, since I don't follow many people, and some people I follow post about lots of stuff I don't care about

from the study:

We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks

timbit422• 5 months ago

I don't follow people who post about lots of stuff I don't care about. I follow hashtags instead, which gives me a much higher signal to noise ratio than following those people.

apparent6• 5 months ago

I thought hashtags were dead. Does this surface tweets that just have the word, not the hashtag? Can you follow multiple words using boolean operators?

jmyeet• 5 months ago

I blame Google for a lot of this. Why? Because they more than anyone else succedded in spreading the propaganda that "the algorithm" was like some unbiased even all-knowing black box with no human influence whatsoever. They did this for obvious self-serving reasons to defend how Google properties ranked in search results.

But now people seem to think newsfeeds, which increase the influence of "the algorithm", are just a result of engagement and (IMHO) nothing could be further from the truth.

Factually accurate and provable statements get labelled "misinformation" (either by human intervention or by other AI systems ostensibly created to fight misinformation) and thus get lower distribution. All while conspiracy theories get broad distribution.

Even ignoring "misinformation", certain platforms will label some content as "political" and other content as not when a "political" label often comes down to whether or not you agree with it.

One of the most laughable incidents of putting a thumb on the scale was when Grok started complaining about white genocide in South Africa in completely unrelated posts [1].

I predict a coming showdown over Section 230 about all this. Briefly, S230 establishes a distinction between being a publisher (eg a newspaper) and a platform (eg Twitter) and gave broad immunity from prosecution for the platform for user-generated content. This was, at the time (the 1990s), a good thing.

But now we have a third option: social media platforms have become de facto publishers while pretending to be platforms. How? Ranking algorithms, recommendations and newsfeeds.

Think about it this way: imagine you had a million people in an auditorium and you were taking audience questions. What if you only selected questions that were supportive of the government or a particular policy? Are you really a platform? Or are you selecting user questions to pretend something has broad consensus or to push a message compatible with the views of the "platform's" owner?

My stance is that if you, as a platform, actively suppresses and promotoes content based on politics (as IMHO they all do), you are a publisher not a platform in the Section 230 sense.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

dagelf3• 5 months ago

Theres much more diversity of thought on the right, did they get more open minded?

ortusdux• 5 months ago

There was a great study from a decade ago that showed that baseball cards held by lighter skinned hands outsold cards held by darker skinned individuals on eBay.

An algorithm designed today with the goal of helping users pick the most profitable product photo would probably steer people towards using caucasian models, and because eBay's cut is a percentage, they would be incentivized to use it.

Studies show that conservatives tend to respond more positively to sponsored content. If this is true, algorithm-driven ad-sponsored social sites will tend towards conservative content.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1756-2171.12...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2024.2...

periodjet• 5 months ago

It couldn’t be possible for a social media feed to influence users in the direction of issues important to the Democratic Party, could it?

Or would that just be considered an unalloyed good?

alecco• 5 months ago

What a garbage short and shallow take. They are all like that. And it even started with news networks (90s CNN in particular). BlueSky, reddit, Tik Tok, and even YouTube, they all have horrible userbases and algorithmic tendencies towards doomscrolling. Lots of bot accounts for the past 10 years. And now hyper-powered by AI content.

You can tune some of them by heavily curating what you follow and blocking a lot. But it's an uphill battle.

The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

The political effects of X's feed algorithm

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