For a while now, researchers have been trying to prove that X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) has an algorithmic bias for conservative content. Indeed, ever since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022, right-wing accounts have run rampant on the site—so much so that onlookers suspect those accounts are being actively promoted. A pair of researchers now claim to have collected evidence that the site is putting its thumb on the scale. They also say that promotion likely began on a very specific date: the day a would-be assassin took a shot at Donald Trump during a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In a working paper entitled “A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election,” researchers with the Queensland University of Technology in Australia argue that there is evidence that the microblogging site began promoting conservative content to users in the months before Americans cast their ballots. Researchers used “statistical models to rigorously compare engagement patterns before and after a key change point.” The research was designed to determine whether prominent conservative accounts—including Musk’s—were being algorithmically favored by the platform.
According to researchers, there is evidence that’s the case, and they also claim to have pinpointed the exact date that X began to see a surge in engagement with right-wing content. “The analysis reveals a structural engagement shift around mid-July 2024, suggesting platform-level changes that influenced engagement metrics for all accounts under examination,” the report says. “The date at which the structural break (spike) in engagement occurs coincides with Elon Musk’s formal endorsement of Donald Trump on 13th July 2024.”
Musk’s endorsement of Trump came on the same day that Trump was shot at by a gunman. In a post on X, shared in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, Musk said: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.”
To investigate potential algorithmic bias, researchers looked at engagement metrics related to various prominent Republican-leaning accounts (including those belonging to rightwing influencers like Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Libs of TikTok) and compared them to various prominent Democrat-leaning accounts (including those belonging to AOC and Bernie Sanders). Researchers say that, after Musk’s endorsement, they found evidence of a “group-specific boost,” in which the Republican-leaning accounts saw a huge surge in page views relative to Democrat-leaning accounts. Researchers write that such findings could be indicative of a “possible recommendation bias” that favored Republican content “in terms of visibility, potentially via recommendation mechanisms such as the ‘For You’ feed.”
However, the account with the most evidence of promotion seems to have been the one belonging to Musk himself, researchers write. The report states that there was a “significant boost that Elon Musk received to his engagement metrics following the structural break.” It goes on: “These findings underscore a distinct pattern that may indicate an algorithmic shift that disproportionately favored Musk’s account, contributing to a considerable engagement advantage,” the researchers write. “This visibility bias, if linked to platform algorithm adjustments, highlights the impact of such structural changes on engagement dynamics and the potential for differential treatment among users.”
The study isn’t the first one to claim that Musk’s platform is algorithmically weighted towards conservatives. A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal similarly alleged that X seemed to reflexively feed right-wing content to new accounts on the platform.
It should also be noted that right-wing content began to surge on X far before Trump was shot at. As early as late 2022, Musk himself began promoting increasingly unhinged right-wing conspiracy theories. In April, it was reported that Nazi-affiliated accounts had begun to crop up on the site and become verified. A research study from Pew Research found that, under Musk’s stewardship, the site has been shifting rightward for quite some time.
The increasingly unhinged content on X seems to be driving users away—and many are flocking to the alternative microblogging site Bluesky. In the weeks since the election, Bluesky—which was set up by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey—has gained as many as a million users a day, with traffic shooting up by 500 percent. The site, which has seen modest growth since it was spun off from Twitter in 2022, now has approximately 20 million users and continues to grow rapidly. (Someone even set up a real-time counter that tracks the site’s growth). On X, meanwhile, around 100,000 accounts were closed in the days following the election, including some belonging to prominent users, like Don Lemon, The Guardian, Mark Hamill, and Ben Stiller for some reason. The outflow of users has been dubbed the ‘X-odus.’
Bluesky is a weird, fun site, that is, in many ways, indistinguishable from X (except for all the rightwing content). That said, it seems hard to imagine that X will simply collapse. The site currently has hundreds of millions of daily active users and, while it isn’t at all profitable (indeed, it continues to hemorrhage money at a stunning pace), it is simply too valuable politically for Musk—who is now a formal part of the incoming Trump administration—to give it up. As Musk moves into the White House to head his DOGE task force dedicated to “government efficiency,” X will continue to prove a useful medium by which to spread the new government’s messaging.
There are also signs that, with Trump’s victory, revenue flows that had previously abandoned X are starting to return. A number of prominent advertisers that had ditched the platform (this, after Musk very publicly told them to fuck off) have returned since Trump was re-elected, including Disney, Comcast, IBM, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment, according to an unverified report from Adweek. In short: I highly doubt that X’s increasingly right-wing tenor is going to turn off enough users to tank the platform.
