• It looks like Twitter is more likely to show content from Republican or right-wing accounts.
• This is the conclusion reached by two new reports in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
• Is this because Twitter users want this? Or because Trump supporter Elon Musk wants them to see it?

Is X, the service many of us still call Twitter, more likely to show users political posts from Republican or right-leaning accounts?

Yes. Probably.

That’s the conclusion of two different deep dive studies published Tuesday in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Next question: Is Twitter doing this intentionally, at the behest of its owner Elon Musk?

That’s harder to answer.

Both questions are of course important, because there is only one week left until the US presidential election. And although Twitter has become a financial disaster under Musk’s ownership, it remains an important news hub for many millions of people.

Musk, who once supported the Democrats, has now thrown his weight behind Donald Trump’s campaign. He says “democracy is over” if Trump loses.

Neither the Journal nor the Post want to draw a direct line between Musk’s politics and Twitter’s activities. But there are certainly some dotted line suggestions. I reached out to Twitter for comment.

The Details: Both articles used software to analyze what users see on Twitter. The Post examined tweets from top congressional accounts for more than a year; The Journal created 14 brand new Twitter accounts that were controlled by bots and spread across the United States.

The Post’s conclusion: Tweets from congressional accounts across the spectrum are receiving less attention than they did a year ago. But Republican tweets are much more likely to go viral than Democratic tweets.

The Journal’s findings do not exactly match those of the Post. It notes that these are theoretical new users who have told Twitter that they are not Those interested in politics found their feeds clogged with political content anyway. And while it says Kamala Harris’ campaign was the most viewed account, the platform overall trended right: “Ten of the other top 14 most viewed leaned right, including Trump’s, and overall appeared pro-Trump.” Content about twice as common as “Pro-Harris material.”

What is responsible for the shift to the right? Neither paper seeks to make a definitive statement. But both revolve around two possibilities that are not mutually exclusive:

Theory 1: Twitter shows users what users want to see.

That’s the argument Musk himself makes. And there is sound logic behind it. First of all, even before Musk purchased Twitter, its own researchers found that the “political right is more strongly represented on the platform compared to the political left.”

And it’s entirely plausible that some left-leaning users left the platform during Musk’s tenure, in part because he reinstated accounts of right-leaning users, including Trump himself. Conservatives could also support it for the same reason.

And those users may be more likely to engage with right-leaning content, prompting the site’s algorithm to show them more of it — in the same way all Social media sites generally work on popular content.

Theory 2: Twitter shows users what Musk wants them to see.

This is a view held by some current and former Twitter users, although there is no direct evidence of it. But there are enough precedents for this, as Musk has repeatedly moved the platform according to his whims in the past.

Most famously, Musk instructed engineers to highlight his own tweets after the 2023 Super Bowl, as Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer has reported.

Musk has also used the site to conduct interviews with political figures he is interested in, including a flawed conversation with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023 and one with Trump this summer.

The Journal also reports that “Musk recently complained that a fraction of users were watching his live streams,” forcing its engineers to promote those chats on the site.

Correction: October 29, 2024 – An earlier version of this story misattributed the detail that Musk complained about his livestream views. The Journal reported it, not the Post.