User:WikiFouf/X algorithms

Changes to the algorithm

"For You" feed

Under Elon Musk, Twitter's "Newsfeed" tab was split into two new tabs: "For You" and "Following". While the latter, like "Newsfeed", only displays activity from accounts followed by the user, "For You" displays an algorithmically curated feed similar to that of TikTok. With a paid subscription to Twitter Blue, users can have their tweets boosted by this algorithm. This change was blamed for a rise in disinformation on the platform, with some paying accounts being used to spread fake news, notably pro-Kremlin propaganda related to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Promotion of Elon Musk's tweets

On February 7, 2023, Elon Musk convened a meeting of Twitter engineers and advisors to address the decline in engagement with his own tweets. One of the company's two principal engineers, after suggesting that public interest in Musk was waning following a peak during his acquisition of the platform, was fired. A Google Trends chart presented by employees had showed a decline in popularity. The following week, after the Super Bowl LVII, Twitter employee James Musk, who is Elon's paternal cousin, sent a message to the company's engineers concerning a "high urgency" matter: that Elon Musk's tweet about the Super Bowl had received less impressions than one sent by US president Joe Biden. By that afternoon, Twitter's algorithm had been altered to artificially boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000. Many users observed an overwhelming promotion of his posts in the "For You" tab. Following criticism, the boost was lessened to a smaller factor.

Promotion of state-controlled media

On April 6, 2023, Twitter reversed its official policy stating that the platform would not "recommend or amplify" the content of state-controlled media entities. According to an analysis by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, the change had already taken effect since around March 29, when Twitter stopped filtering government accounts in Russia, China and Iran. These accounts, such as those managed by Russia's RT, have a significant presence on the platform. Following the change, which enabled the accounts to be algorithmically promoted by Twitter, their follower count quickly rose. On April 20, 2023, Twitter stopped using its "state-affiliated" and "government-funded" labels, which had been applied to accounts since 2020.

Promotion of Republican content

A computational analysis published on November 1, 2024 found potential algorithmic bias on Twitter in favour of Republican Party supporters. The study, which looked at more than 56,000 posts, identified a system-wide "structural break" on the platform around July 13, 2024, a date which coincides with Elon Musk's endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election. From that point on, Elon Musk and other Republican commentators saw increased visibility for their tweets. According to the researchers behind the study, this "could imply an algorithmic adjustment".

Elon Musk’s reach on Twitter is dropping — he just fired a top engineer over it (The Verge - 02-23)

• For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.
• On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
• “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
• One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
• Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
• Musk did not take the news well.
• “You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)
• Dissatisfied with the work of engineers so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.
• It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.
• “Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.
• Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.
• Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement and, therefore, views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.
• An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”
• It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.
• “As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”
• Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter and may hasten its decline into insolvency.
• “We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”
• Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers.
• “There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”
• The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.
• “Most weeknights, they are fully booked,” another current employee said.
• The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? “Sucks — and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”
• Slack — once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything — has gone dormant. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.”
• “People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.”
• When Musk or the goons ask questions, employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer.
• “When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
• (Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)
• Despite the turmoil, remaining employees say that what they call “Twitter 2.0” has managed to improve on its predecessor in at least some ways.
• “In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. “I do appreciate the fact that if you want to do something that you think will improve something, you generally have license to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.”
• The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.
• “If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”
• At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”
• With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.
• “They have to become code archaeologists to dig through the repo and figure out what’s going on,” one employee said.
• Meanwhile, the recent wave of layoffs in the tech industry has contributed to a feeling of paralysis among those who remain at Twitter.
• “I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”
• There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.
• Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘fuck you, regulators,’” we’re told.
• The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says.
• Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.

Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first (The Verge - 02-23)

• At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
• “We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
• When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
• Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
• In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
• Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
• In recent weeks, Musk has been obsessed with the amount of engagement his posts are receiving. Last week, Platformer broke the news that he fired one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined in general.
• His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.
• Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.
• One possibility, engineers said, was that Musk’s reach might have been reduced because he’d been blocked and muted by so many people in recent months. Even before the events of this weekend, Musk’s long stint as Twitter’s main character, both in the run-up to and aftermath of his $44 billion takeover of the company, had led huge numbers of people to filter him out of their feeds.
• But there were also legitimate technical reasons the CEO’s tweets weren’t performing. Twitter’s system has historically promoted tweets from users whose posts perform better to both followers and non-followers in the For You Tab; Musk’s tweets should have fit that model but showed up less only about half the time that some engineers thought they should.
• By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
• Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core ranked feed, now known as “For You.”
• That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.
• Musk acknowledged his bombardment of the timeline on Tuesday afternoon, posting a version of the popular “forced to drink milk” meme in which one woman labeled “Elon’s tweets” forcibly bottle-feeds another woman labeled “Twitter” while pulling her hair back.
• Some of his tweets Monday were sent while he was on calls with Twitter engineers, to test out whether the solutions they’d designed were working as well as he thought they should.
• After Musk’s timeline takeover caused an uproar Monday, he seemed to suggest that the changes would be walked back, at least in part. “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm,” he tweeted.
• The artificial boosts applied to his account remain in place, although the factor is now lower than 1,000, we’re told. Musk’s handful of tweets Tuesday reported around 43 million impressions, which are on the high end of his recent average.
• Absurd as Musk’s antics are, they do highlight a tension familiar to almost anyone who has ever used a social network: why are some posts more popular than others? Why am I seeing this thing, and not that one?
• Engineers for services like TikTok and Instagram can offer partial, high-level answers to these questions. But ranking algorithms make predictions based on hundreds or thousands of signals, and deliver posts to millions of users, making it almost impossible for anyone to say with any degree of accuracy who sees what.
• For better and for worse, that answer hasn’t been good enough for Musk. As Twitter’s most prominent user, with nearly 129 million followers, his posts often get 10 million or more impressions, as counted by Twitter. (There are good reasons to doubt the accuracy of these counts, but better data is not readily available.)
• But Musk’s view counts still fluctuate widely. The bottle-feeding tweet got a reported 118.4 million impressions; his next one, a joke observation previously posted to Reddit and satirically attributed to Abraham Lincoln, got 49.9 million. Some of his tweets from earlier this month had fewer than 8 million.
• The most obvious reason for this discrepancy is that people think some tweets are better than others. But it doesn’t have to work like that: you could also change the ranking algorithms so that they show your posts no matter what.
• Terrified of losing their jobs, this is the system that Twitter engineers are now building.  
• “He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” said a current employee. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”

Elon Musk’s Tweets Are All Over Twitter, Which Is What He Wanted All Along (Gizmodo - 02-23)

• After throwing a hissy fit last week because his tweets weren’t getting enough views, Twitter CEO Elon Musk seems to have finally gotten what he wanted: Musk-filled feeds.
• On Monday, I noticed that my ‘For You’ feed on Twitter had surprisingly more Musk tweets than usual. I didn’t make much of the occurrence at first and reasoned Musk was probably tweeting up a storm while pretending to work again, until I saw that other users were getting Musk-bombed, too. Given that the billionaire fired an engineer who told him people didn’t seem to be interested in him anymore, a lightbulb went off in my head: Ah, this was on purpose.
• Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, Musk himself seemed to chime in to confirm my theory, tweeting out a meme of a girl forcing another to drink milk. He labeled the girl holding the milk bottle “Elon’s tweets” and the girl being forced to drink the milk “Twitter.”
• Although he didn’t acknowledge the Musk-filled feeds, the billionaire tweeted at 3 a.m. ET that his company was tinkering with the algorithm.
• “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm,’” he said.
• The changes to Twitter’s feed and Musk’s comments are the latest developments in the billionaire’s obsession over the number of views he gets on his social network. The saga began on Feb. 1, when the CEO decided to make his account private to see whether that affected his views. The following week, he called a meeting of Twitter’s advisors and engineers to ask why his account, which has nearly 130 million followers, was getting so little views.
• “This is ridiculous,” Musk said, as reported by the Platformer newsletter. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
• Over the weekend, Musk dramatically announced that two significant Twitter problems had been solved, which were mainly related to him. He explained that the company’s engineers had fixed issues that resulted in 95% of his tweets “not getting delivered at all.”
• How exactly that helps anyone else on Twitter besides Musk and the right-wing accounts complaining about their lack of views is unclear, but one thing’s certain: It’s highly unlikely that Musk is going to throw a tantrum over his tweets suddenly flooding everyone’s feeds.

State-controlled media experience sudden Twitter gains after unannounced platform policy change (DFRLab - 04-23)

• Multiple Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media outlets on Twitter simultaneously began to gain followers after months of decline or stagnation, the DFRLab has discovered. A DFRLab assessment suggests that Twitter changed its algorithms regarding these accounts around March 29, 2023. NPR confirmed on April 21 that Twitter had made the deliberate decision to stop filtering government accounts in Russia, China, and Iran. That same day, Reuters reported that Twitter had removed its state media labels from their accounts as well.
• From August 7, 2020 until 21:10 GMT on April 6, 2023, Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines on state-affiliated accounts stated, “In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people.” By 23:39 GMT that evening, however, Twitter had removed this sentence from its platform policy. The change occurred after Semafor and VOA journalist Wenhao Ma wrote about how Twitter was no longer limiting state-affiliated media outlets on its platform.
• Twitter’s policy change is significant, as Twitter can now algorithmically promote state-affiliated media outlets. Twitter users no longer must actively seek out state-sponsored content in order to see it on the platform; it can just be served to them. Many state-affiliated media outlets, particularly in authoritarian countries, publish content to exert influence, sometimes leveraging disinformation and propaganda in their articles to achieve these aims.
• Meanwhile, many trusted news outlets in the US that receive limited government support, including NPR and PBS, have quit using the platform in recent days over disputes about Twitter labeling them as state-affiliated outlets. These labels were removed at the same time as their removal from Russian, Chinese and Iranian state media accounts. The exodus of reliable news outlets, combined with Twitter no longer moderating state-sponsored accounts which have built up significant presences, could lead to a very different information environment on Twitter. Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media organizations have a significant presence on the platform; Russian television network Russia Today (RT) has at least nine accounts labeled by Twitter as “government-affiliated,” while the Chinese television network China Global Television Network (CGTN) has at least twenty-eight accounts labeled by Twitter, and Iran’s PressTV has at least five. Many of these accounts are targeted to specific regions and languages or topics.
• While open-source researchers cannot access Twitter’s algorithms directly, analyzing Twitter data helps paint a picture of when this platform change likely occurred. DFRLab analysis indicates that this change actually occurred earlier than April 6 – likely around March 29, 2023. This suggests that for a period of time, Twitter may have violated their own Platform Use Guidelines, potentially serving state-sponsored content to Twitter users despite claiming that these accounts and their tweets were still being moderated.
• Some Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media accounts which Twitter had previously labeled as “government-affiliated” were hemorrhaging followers in the months prior to this policy update, then experienced rapid gains after Twitter instituted the change. While multiple factors could contribute to these accounts’ growth trajectory, the sudden, simultaneous increase in followers per day after a period of decline indicates platform-wide algorithmic change around March 29.
• [...]

How Elon Musk Is Changing the Twitter Experience (NYT - 04-23)

• [...]
• Still, users’ experiences are changing. That’s because the kinds of tweets that they see are being affected by Mr. Musk’s behind-the-scenes adjustments. He has tinkered with the algorithm that decides which posts are most visible, thrown out content moderation rules that ban certain kinds of tweets and changed a verification process that confirms the identities of users.
• The upshot is a Twitter that looks similar to the way it always has, but that is clunkier and less predictable in what tweets are surfaced and seen, users said. In some cases, that has caused confusion. Even Twitter’s employees have expressed frustration.
• [...]
• The most notable difference is Twitter’s newsfeed, the stream of posts that people see when they open the app. Newsfeeds previously appeared as a single flow of posts, displaying tweets from only the accounts that a user followed.
• Mr. Musk has cleaved the newsfeed into two. Now when users open Twitter’s app, they see an algorithmically curated “For You” feed, which mimics a popular feature on TikTok, and a “Following” tab.
• The “For You” newsfeed incorporates changes that Mr. Musk has made to Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, pulling in more tweets from people a user doesn’t follow and suggesting new topics and interests. That also means users might see posts from all sorts of content creators whom they might not be interested in. At one point in February, the algorithm flooded users’ feeds with tweets from Mr. Musk.
• Here’s how a user’s “For You” newsfeed might look, with an example of a tweet from an account that the user doesn’t follow and that the algorithm suggests. For users to see posts only from people they follow, they would have to switch to the “Following” tab.
• [...]
• Mr. Musk has begun charging users an $8 monthly fee in exchange for a check mark, with the free check marks starting to disappear this month. He is essentially favoring payments from subscribers, departing from the idea that a check mark meant an account was notable.
• Now yellow check marks indicate corporate accounts, while gray check marks denote the accounts of government officials. Companies can also add their logo to employees’ accounts, verifying their employment. Individuals who pay get the blue-and-white check mark.
• Those who paid for check marks would be boosted by Twitter’s recommendation algorithm and be eligible to appear in people’s “For You” newsfeeds, Mr. Musk said last month. That would prevent spam accounts from gaming the algorithm and rising to the top of the “For You” newsfeeds, he added.

Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Becoming a Sewer of Disinformation (Foreign Policy - 07-23)

• [...]
• Twitter Blue accounts have fueled the spread of disinformation, especially about the Russia–Ukraine war—a topic on which Musk has repeatedly adopted Kremlin talking points. Fake news amplified by Twitter Blue users (and the Twitter algorithm that increases the visibility of their accounts and individual tweets) include horror stories about alleged organ harvesting in Ukraine and the use of guns destined for Ukraine in recent French protests, according to a report published by BBC Verify on Sunday; the report also traced some of this information back to pro-Kremlin propaganda accounts. The new Twitter Blue system not only amplifies these messages on the platform, but also exploits what many users still perceive as a verification system in order to create an illusion of credibility.
• [...]
• Twitter also made changes to government affiliation rules in April 2023, removing labels from state-controlled or affiliated outlets and ending its visibility filtering system, which previously ensured that these outlets wouldn’t be recommended or amplified. Twitter now algorithmically promotes state-affiliated media, amplifying outlets based in China, Russia, and Iran. Multiple Russian and Chinese state media accounts on Twitter simultaneously began to gain followers after the change. Following months of decline or stagnation in their follower numbers, these propaganda accounts are now thriving on Twitter.
• [...]
• Twitter has long been a source for journalists and media outlets, as well as a source of news and current affairs for most users. However, Musk appears to be dismantling the foundations of the platform’s success—and destroying what little keeps social media resilient to information warfare. We already know that Twitter’s algorithms amplify certain political voices over others. Twitter’s recent elimination of verification, abolishment of the government affiliation label, reinstatement of previously banned accounts, significant reductions in trust and safety staff, and decreased focus on fighting disinformation have created an algorithmically fueled propaganda megaphone.

Elon Musk appears to have tweaked X’s algorithm to promote Trump, study claims (The Independent - 11-24)

• Elon Musk appears to have been artificially boosting his posts on X (formerly Twitter) since mid July in order to promote pro-Trump content, according to new research.
• Analysis of the social media platform – which the tech billionaire acquired in 2022 – showed that Mr Musk’s posts saw a sudden increase in views and engagement shortly after he began endorsing Donald Trump for US president.
• Many of these posts on X were either supporting the Republican candidate or undermining the campaign of his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, with the increase in views and retweets occurring at a much higher rate in comparison with other prominent political accounts on the app.
• “This raises suspicions as to whether Musk has tweaked the platform’s algorithm to increase the reach of his posts in advance of the US presidential election,” wrote Timothy Graham, an associate professor in digital media at Queensland University of Technology and Mark Andrejevic, a professor in media at Monash University, who undertook the research.
• Engagement on Mr Musk’s posts more than doubled following this suspected algorithm tweak, which the researchers say occurred after the X owner first endorsed Mr Trump after he was targeted by an assassination attempt.

• The “sudden boost” coincides with the tech billionaire’s endorsement of Donald Trump for US president, which took place shortly after the Republican candidate was targeted by an assassination attempt.

• “The analysis of Elon Musk’s engagement metrics on X (formerly Twitter) reveals that Musk’s account exhibited distinct and elevated engagement patterns compared to other accounts, particularly around a key structural change on 13 July, 2024,” the researchers wrote in a study detailing their analysis.
• “These findings underscore a distinct pattern that may indicate an algorithmic shift that disproportionately favoured Musk’s account, contributing to a considerable engagement advantage.”
• The researchers studied more than 56,000 posts on X from a selection of Democrat-leaning and Republican-leaning accounts in order to provide a basis of comparison for Mr Musk’s political posts.
• Examining three engagement metrics – view counts, retweets and favourites – the study found that the potential of algorithmic bias “favoured [his] content in terms of visibility or recommendation” from 13 July onwards.
• After this date, view counts of the billionaire’s posts shot up by 138 per cent, while retweets rose by 238 per cent, suggesting that he benefited from “an enhanced increase in visibility post-change relative to other accounts”.
• The results raise important questions about the potential impact of algorithmic adjustments on public discourse and the ‘neutrality’ of social media platforms, according to the researchers.
• “This outcome has broader implications for understanding how platform algorithms may shape public discourse by influencing which voices and content receive heightened visibility and interaction,” the study concluded.
• The study detailing the results, titled ‘A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election’, is currently available in preprint form.