Political content is being inserted into new X users’ feeds, even if they have selected other interests such as cooking, sports, and crafts.
Customers who come to X looking for a respite from a blizzard of political news are struggling to escape no matter how hard they try, according to an analysis from the Wall Street Journal. The political content was found to lean toward former President Donald Trump and sow doubt about the integrity of the election on Nov. 5.
The newspaper created 14 accounts on the social media platform, registering them in different states and selecting only nonpolitical interests for their “For You” pages. Nonetheless, a majority of the posts in their feeds were partisan or related to the election.
The analysis found Kamala Harris‘s campaign was No. 1 for most-seen accounts, but 10 of the other top 14 most-seen accounts leaned to the right, including Trump’s campaign. So while the Harris campaign’s strategy of embracing young voters’ memes and viral posts to further her audience may be paying off, the newspaper reported that pro-Trump content appeared nearly twice as much as pro-Harris media.
One post that was seen by nearly all of the newspapers’ new accounts was by catturd2 and said, “If that cringe, dingbat, zero-votes, airhead Kamala Harris is able to cheat enough to win the presidency — the USA is over.”
One of the accounts that was created had a location of Pennsylvania and selected parenting, baseball, and painting as interests. In only one session, X inserted political posts, including a livestream of a Trump rally, into the feed. One pro-Trump platform, End Wokeness, was seen by 13 of the accounts created.
Of the 26,000 unique posts seen in the accounts’ feeds, less than a third were political in nature, but the political content was shown to the accounts so often that more than half of the feeds’ content was political.
An account interested in running, theme parks, and crafts saw the most political content, and an account interested in travel, music, and science saw the least.
The experiment was unable to establish why X was recommending political content.
“The algorithm is open source and just tries to show people what they’re most likely to find engaging,” Elon Musk posted on X in August. Musk’s account is recommended as the first account to follow when creating an X account, and his posts appeared at the top of the accounts’ For You page more than any other user.
Musk endorsed Trump on July 13 and has financially supported him in his campaign. Yet Musk insists X’s content dealings are separate from his personal views.
“The platform is neutral, but I will voice whatever opinions I have,” Musk posted in June.
Former X engineers have said several factors could be influencing the sudden influx of political content on the site. X reinstated thousands of suspended accounts that had previously violated the platform’s policies. The accounts included many right-wing users and Trump’s own account, @realdonaldtrump, which had been taken down after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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Before being bought by Musk in late 2022, Twitter’s research department found the site already favored right-leaning voices. Before the researchers could find out why the algorithm was pushing the content, Musk purchased the company and removed the research department.
The Pew Research Center found that 53% of right-leaning users now see X more favorably, up from 17% in 2021. Left-leaning users still outnumbered right-leaning users on X last year, 26% to 20%.