Deep dive investigation reveals how Elon Musk’s X algorithm has added bias to Twitter

Shock horror: Trump’s ex-BFF, Elon Musk, has turned Twitter into a right-wing cesspit full to the brim of hate speech, despite having fallen out with the president and no longer hanging onto his every word.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it as X, he promised transparency, freedom of expression, and a fairer algorithm. However, since taking over, he has gutted moderation teams, reinstated banned accounts, and allowed misinformation to thrive.

Now, a detailed investigation by Sky News suggests that those promises appear to not only have been buried, but that they were never part of the plan in the first place.

• “Elon Musk is fitter than LeBron James”

Over nine months, the team built nine new accounts - three left-leaning, three right-leaning, and three politically neutral - to study how the “For You” feed actually behaves. What they found points to a clear ideological imbalance in how X serves us political content.

The accounts were designed to mirror ordinary users, each following a handful of UK politicians, commentators, and outlets that matched their supposed political interests. Once the experiment began, Sky News let the algorithm do the rest, allowing for no manual searches or interaction with posts to potentially influence proceedings. The aim to see what Twitter’s ‘free and fair’ recommendation system would prioritise for each type of user.

The outcome was striking. Across all nine profiles, right-wing content dominated like a disease. Even the users who followed mostly left-leaning voices received more right-wing posts than expected. For neutral accounts, the effect was even stronger: they were shown roughly double the amount of right-wing material compared to left-wing. In contrast, users that followed right-leaning figures rarely saw any opposing views in their feed at all, allowing conspiracy theories and hate-stoking views to go unchallenged.

The data also highlighted that much of this promoted material came from accounts using inflammatory or hostile language, with a large portion of those belonging to right-wing sources. This suggests that X’s algorithm may reward engagement-driven content that provokes anger or outrage regardless of accuracy or tone. Welcome to Musk’s world, and we’re all scrolling in it: a megaphone for one side of the political spectrum, amplifying right-wing voices while silencing others.

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