Incident 296: Twitter Recommender System Amplified Right-Leaning Tweets
Description: Twitter’s “Home” timeline algorithm was revealed by its internal researchers to have amplified tweets and news of rightwing politicians and organizations more than leftwing ones in six out of seven studied countries.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Twitter developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Twitter left-leaning politicians , Twitter left-leaning news organizations , Twitter left-leaning users and Twitter Users.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
296
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2016-02-10
Editors
Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
economist.com · 2020
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SINCE LAUNCHING a policy on “misleading information” in May, Twitter has clashed with President Donald Trump. When he described mail-in ballots as “substantially fraudulent”, the platform told users to “get the facts” and linked to articles…
theguardian.com · 2021
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Twitter has admitted it amplifies more tweets from rightwing politicians and news outlets than content from leftwing sources.
The social media platform examined tweets from elected officials in seven countries – the UK, US, Canada, France, …
pnas.org · 2021
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Significance
The role of social media in political discourse has been the topic of intense scholarly and public debate. Politicians and commentators from all sides allege that Twitter’s algorithms amplify their opponents’ voices, or silence…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
