A study by the Media Research Center (MRC) found that Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) algorithm promotes left-leaning media, while punishing a majority of right-leaning media.
The MRC reviewed 62 media outlets on the political left, center, and right, finding that Elon Musk’s X social media platform “overwhelmingly favors left-leaning media,” boosting 100 percent of the 30 left-leaning media outlets reviewed, while de-boosting 74 percent of the 23 right-leaning media outlets reviewed.
“Elon Musk has been cleaning house at X to turn it into a free speech platform,” MRC Vice President for Free Speech Dan Schneider said. “The transformation has been astounding, but he still has to excise some of the ghosts from the Jack Dorsey era who continue to engage in election interference.”
The MCR noted that X’s AI tool “Grok” explains that X uses a “Reputation” score to determine “the visibility and likelihood of a user’s content being recommended to others.” This reputation score favors leftist media, likely by design under the previous leadership of X/Twitter.
When MRC researchers asked Grok to explain itself, the AI chatbot said “the minimum Tweepcred [Reputation] score required for a user to be recommended on Twitter is 65,” indicating that any account with a lower score is de-boosted.
Moreover, Grok added, “Accounts with higher Tweepcred scores are more likely to have their posts seen by a larger audience, while those with lower scores may have their posts deprioritized in the platform’s algorithm.” In the case of media outlets, there is a clear tendency for X to give conservative media lower reputation scores, resulting in deboosting and lower engagement, as compared to leftist outlets that enjoy boosting based on their reputation scores.
In researching X’s algorithm, the MRC said it used a previously disclosed methodology to determine the scores of each media outlet, examining media from a list provided by AllSides — which classifies the outlets based on “right” to “left” political affiliation.
The MRC pointed out that its study comes after two earlier studies that also found X’s algorithm favors left-leaning media.
The first study discovered that X boosted congressional Democrats’ social media posts while suppressing posts from Republicans ahead of the 2024 election.
The second study found that X’s algorithm favors Vice President Kamala Harris over Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), former President Donald Trump’s running mate. This is likely helping Harris reach a broader audience in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
As the MRC’s Dan Schneider pointed out, X’s algorithm bias — and inevitable election interference — may not be the fault of Musk, who still has considerable work to clean up code and algorithms that have been left behind from site’s “Twitter” days.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.