Specifically, the Sky News team ran a study where they created nine new Twitter/X accounts, three left-wing, three right-wing, and three politically neutral, and then tracked what content got dumped into their “For You” tabs on the Elon Musk-owned social media service during a one-month period in 2025. (Working with political analysts and data scientists to determine whether content was coming from “extreme” accounts on either end of the spectrum, and whether they were left or right-leaning in nature.) And, wouldn’t you know it: While the experiment’s right-wing accounts got almost exclusively right-wing material, all accounts got more of it than left-wing or neutral stuff. (Notably, the three “politically neutral” accounts got about twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content.)
And, before you ask, yes, the study worked to correct for the idea that the posts being shown were simply the most popular or engaged with: Sky News demonstrated that despite having equal or higher levels of engagement (and significantly higher follower counts), some left-leaning political figures had their posts dropped in front of users’ eyes way less than, say, Rupert Lowe, a far-right independent MP who’s gotten a lot of direct interactions and support from service owner Musk. (Being a British news organization, the Sky report is mostly focused on Twitter’s impact on U.K. politics.) The findings show that, given similar levels of popularity and engagement, the X algorithm is more likely to show a user right-wing content than from an author on the left.
Which is all pretty grim, if not necessarily surprising. (See also the finding that at least 50 percent of all content shown to users comes from authors who were determined to employ “extreme” language, on either side of the political divide.) Musk has been very aggressive in recent months about trying to put his thumb on the scale of U.K. politics, in a similar way to how he remora eel’d his way onto the body of the 2024 United States presidential campaign. Despite a lot of high-minded talk about buying Twitter in order to turn it into a free speech-loving, sink-filled paradise, the new findings suggest the far more obvious conclusion that he’s spent the years since the purchase turning the once-vital social media network into an incredibly expensive propaganda machine.
