Following research undertaken by the company, Twitter announced today that its algorithm actually amplifies right-leaning political content over left-wing content.

The news might come as a shock to some, especially former president Donald Trump, who has been exiled by much of social media. He has accused Twitter and other social media companies of harboring a political bias against conservative news. But to others, it supports what they thought.

Twitter has in the past admitted that its algorithm isn’t perfect at times, which led the company to conduct the research. In this case, researchers examined tweets from politicians in seven countries: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. It also tried to understand if the algorithm amplifies political content in general.

“We analyzed millions of Tweets from April 1 to August 15, 2020, from accounts operated by elected officials in seven countries,” said Twitter in a blog post. “We used this data to test whether or not these Tweets are amplified more on the algorithmically ranked Home timeline than the reverse chronological feed and whether there was variance within a party.”

The company said that overall, political content from elected officials does see algorithmic amplification, but the researchers also said that in six out of the seven nations, right-leaning content showed more amplification than left-leaning content. The only country not to follow the trend was Germany.

Still, Twitter is unsure what caused this. The company said it’s complex. “Algorithmic amplification is not problematic by default – all algorithms amplify,” Twitter said. “Algorithmic amplification is problematic if there is preferential treatment as a function of how the algorithm is constructed versus the interactions people have with it.”

Twitter is a sociotechnical system – our algos are responsive to what’s happening. What’s next is a root cause analysis – is this unintended model bias? Or is this a function of what & how people tweet, and things that are happening in the world? Or both? 6/n

— Rumman Chowdhury (@ruchowdh) October 21, 2021

Following this internal research, Twitter now hopes to get researchers outside of the company on board so that they might help figure out just why right-leaning content gets more attention on the platform. The company said it’s now time to have a “productive conversation” and share hypotheses about this anomaly.

Image: Alexander Shatov/Unsplash