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by tzs 333 days ago
> I can only anecdotally say that in America, it appears to me that the ones most engaged with social media on X are more often than not right leaning. More of the left-leaning engagement seems increasingly moving towards other outlets, such as Bluesky.

Isn't that movement because Musk changed X to increase promotion of right-wing things and decrease promotion of left-wing things?

Before Musk Twitter did promote right-wing stuff more than left-wing stuff. I don't have a cite but there was a paper published by researchers who had been given full access to internal Twitter data that showed this.

That level of right-leaning is probably the level of right-leaning you get from the natural level of engagement you get on a fairly neutral platform from right-wing people being more likely to engage than left-wing people.

1 comments

After Elon bought Twitter, they ended up losing something like 10% of their users. That's going to be made up mostly of highly ideological ostensibly left-leaning Americans, likely with a much higher than average "engagement." And the lion's share of that happened long before there were any meaningful algorithmic changes. That alone is going to create a meaningful shift in the status quo on overtly political topics.