Blog: A Global Study on X's Political Amplification

Social Media has become an integral part of our lives, playing a major role in our day-to-day activities and enabling discussions with people, beyond one's immediate social network. A growing body of research points to the challenges social media presents, as it can be used as a tool to spread radical messages and misinformation. Twitter (now X) is one of the most widely used social media platforms with over 410 million monthly active users and over 370 million advertiser-reachable users in 2023. Over time, it has emerged as a hotspot for political discussions. However, prior research indicates that Twitter might be biased towards right-wing content. Given the recent changes to Twitter's algorithms and policies, particularly in content flagging and Twitter Blue Verification, it is crucial to conduct an audit to understand the potential biases towards specific content or political ideologies.

 

To investigate this issue, we use the newly released `view counts' feature to look for evidence of differences in reach amplification. We perform a global analysis by collecting tweets from 6547 accounts belonging to political leaders and parties from twelve countries, namely, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the UK, and the US, from December 2022 to June 2023 and test whether higher levels of party-system polarization are correlated with higher amplification of extreme content. To separate period from cohort effects, in our analysis, we group users by their Twitter age, i.e. time since account creation. Our results reveal that the overall view counts went down for all countries and all political ideologies during our study period. However, this decrease in engagement is lower for the political Right than the political Left in five out of seven countries. Our study is the first to (i) bring a global perspective, (ii) look at platform changes across time, and (iii) incorporate measures of view counts.

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