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Posted

(You need to visit the site; the graphics illustrating their findings are outstanding)

https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464487#

HOW ELON MUSK IS BOOSTING THE BRITISH RIGHT 

For nine months, Sky News' Data and Forensics team has been investigating whether X's algorithm amplifies right-wing and extreme content. It does.

 

Quote

"Elon Musk is a great leader," says Amy, a British woman outside the Britannia Hotel in London at an anti-immigration rally in August. She was there to vent her frustrations at migrants housed in the hotel and says X owner Musk's platform is the only social media she trusts.

"We don't want sanctions. We want freedom of speech." Amy's view is one resonating with a growing number of British people.

A month after we met Amy, thousands chanted Musk's name at the Unite the Kingdom march - a political rally organised by the anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson. Musk dialled in from America, his face appearing on a screen above a huge crowd in Westminster.

 

Quote

His speech was also live-streamed on X.

The image of Musk in front of a sea of adoring fans was symbolic of the tech tycoon's increasingly prominent role in British politics. 

He's one of the world's richest men, and most powerful. And over the past year, he has weighed in on many contentious issues dominating debates in the UK.

He has used his social media platform X to encourage British people to fly English flagsand has endorsed fringe right-wing politicians. In a recent post, he compared illegal immigrants to monstrous fictional characters in JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, and suggested all English people would die if they did not support Mr Robinson.

 

Quote

With these comments, Musk is flexing his ability to influence the political debate in a country where he holds no formal authority. He does, however, have power to control narratives on X, formerly Twitter. 

And now, a Sky News investigation can reveal the platform is boosting right-wing content, extreme content, and politicians Musk favours.

 

Spoiler

THE X-FILES

It has been over three years since Musk walked into what was then Twitter's headquarters with a sink and a promise: to turn the platform into a haven for free speech. 

He has criticised other social media companies for being "controlled by far-left activists", with the content "filtered through a far-left San Francisco Berkeley lens". 

In an effort to run things differently, he renamed the company, fired roughly 80% of the staff, and promised to make the algorithm's code open source. That code was posted to the website Github in 2023, and was last updated in September 2025. 

An X spokesperson told Sky News that the algorithm will soon be fully AI-powered, at which point X "will open source the algorithm every two weeks or so". By December, they say users will be able to adjust their feeds "dynamically", by asking X's AI tool Grok.

As it stands, the open source code gives an insight into how the algorithm behaves, but experts say it is far from a full picture.

"They [X] do have a version of the algorithm online, but it doesn't really tell us how decisions are being made about what content gets amplified and what doesn't," says Dr Jen Golbeck, a computer science professor who studies social media and extremism at Maryland University. 

One of the only ways to audit the algorithm today is to create new accounts and see what content surfaces. 

The 'X-periment'

We created nine new X users, each one emulating a British person with a particular political leaning: three were left-wing users, three were right-wing and three were neutral, designed to show no interest in politics.

Over the course of two weeks in May, we collected posts from the users' For You pages - essentially their homepage for recommended content - twice a day. That gave us a database of around 90,000 posts from roughly 22,000 accounts.

Tap to read how Sky News avoided bias in our new users' accounts.

We worked with independent academics and researchers, including Dr Golbeck, to categorise the political leanings of around 6,000 accounts whose posts showed up most in our dataset. Analysing that data helped us understand what content the algorithm prioritises.

 

 

There's a lot more at the link.  

Posted (edited)

Sky news saying this is like Fox saying this, or Newsmax.  Normally not credible, pretty credible on this.

Oh, damn, wrong about this.  Thought it was Brit version of Sky AU, which it is/was, but has escaped the clutches of Murdoch and is now legit.

Edited by TwiceHorn

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