A highly revealing finding was made by an investigation conducted by the same Twitter. According to this study, the algorithm of the popular social network strengthens and promotes users more tweets from right-wing political parties and news outlets versus left-wing ones.
The Twitter survey specifically looked at tweets from political parties and users who shared news content on seven countries around the world: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Millions of tweets sent between April 1 and August 15, 2020 were analyzed.
The study compared the timeline of Twitter’s “Home” [σ.σ: τον προεπιλεγμένο τρόπο με τον οποίο εξυπηρετούνται τα tweets στους 200 εκατομμύρια χρήστες του, στον οποίο ένας αλγόριθμος προσαρμόζει αυτό που βλέπουν οι χρήστες] with the traditional timeline where the most recent tweets rank first.
The researchers then used the data to see which tweets were most widely used by the algorithm.
The researchers found that right-wing parties and factions enjoyed higher levels of “algorithmic reinforcement” than those on the left. However, they admitted that “They can not explain why this is happening”, although they promised that this issue would be addressed, although they spoke of a “very difficult answer to an equally difficult question”.
THE Twitter’s director of Meta (Machine-learning, ethics, transparency, accountability) Ruman Choundari told the BBC“Our next step is to identify the cause behind the phenomenon,” he said, adding that “in six of the seven countries we surveyed, the tweets posted by right-wing politicians were algorithmically stronger than those of their left-wing opponents.” .
“Identifying the cause of this recurring pattern is very difficult and is something that Meta should do,” Choudari said.
The researchers, however, argued that The difference in promotion may be due to “different strategies” used by political parties to address social media users, stubbornly denying that these findings suggest that Twitter algorithms are pushing for “extreme ideologies” amid criticism to the contrary.
It is worth noting that This is not the first time that Twitter has encountered an obvious bias in its algorithmIn April, the platform said it was conducting a study to determine if its algorithms contributed to “unintentional failures”.
Shortly afterwards, in May, the media revealed that the automatic image cropping had issues that favored whites over blacks and women over men.
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