The X-periment: Sky News Proves Elon’s Algorithm Does Pick a Side
Nine fake British users, ninety-thousand posts and one undeniable conclusion - X is boosting the far right, and the rest of us were never meant to win the argument.
So, I am very pleased to say that I wasn’t imagining things.
All those nights that I sat with Twitter on my screen1, staring at a continuous torrent of abuse, bile and badly spelled tinfoil-hatted hysteria pouring into my mentions, I’d occasionally have a small flicker of doubt - kind of thinking to myself that “maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just too sensitive, or maybe this place really is the world’s digital equivalent of a public urinal and I’m the fool that keeps coming back to check if the graffiti makes sense this time.2”
But it wasn’t me - it really was the algorithm.
In an excellent report published today, Sky News has done an investigation into the sewer that many of us have finally escaped - X (nee, Twitter). It’s something that we have obviously known for ages, that the system is in some way rigged. And not in the fun, “stick it to the man” kind of way, but in the algorithmic, mathematically precise sense - tilted (not even slightly) towards the frothing, the furious and the far-right3. The team at Sky have joined the conversation about just how insane social media is with a dataset the size of a small town and they quantified the qualities we’ve all been feeling.
Tens of thousands of accounts, tens of thousands of posts and a platform that actively treats anything towards the left of Margaret Thatcher in the same way you would a suspicious liquid at Heathrow while right-wing boilerplate sails through with what appears to be billionaire supported priority boarding.
The timing of this is somewhat poetic. Last year on the 6th of November, I renewed my yearly subscription to X Premium Plus (or whatever it was called) - meaning that it runs out today. My reasons for doing so were practical and pragmatic - at that stage, I was firmly of the belief that if I wanted to make an impact, the best thing I could do is give myself every advantage possible.
Hence I turned into a blue-tick-prick. I paid for the reach and the ability to write long-form posts. I had justified it to myself at the time as a necessary evil - something that had to be done, unfortunately.
Today, is the last day of that tick’s sad existence. I had already left the trash pile that was Twitter just over a month ago4, but the bar tab is closed and I feel like I’m standing in the car park with my coat on, wondering to myself why the fuck it took me so long to get out.
Back to the Sky investigation though - because one of the most important things that came out of it was numbers. Numbers have this habit of cleaning the fog off a window - they can be something that you can feel in your bones (the tilt of a room, the way that certain kind of posters never seem to struggle to be seen), but you second guess yourself because gaslighting is practically a national sport now. But data does help with that - and what the Sky analysis has demonstrated now is that it’s not that there’s been a glitch that’s given Rupert Lowe the visibility of a super-old-nova5 - its not just a few naughty engineers or that the nominal left is being “out-messaged” by a cleverer right - it’s been set up that way.
Key Findings from the Sky News Investigation:
Over 60% of political posts shown were from right-wing accounts with only 32% coming from left-wing accounts and 6% non-partisan.
The bias was present across all users with even neutral users seeing twice as much right-wing content as left wing content.
Left-wing users were still served near equal right-wing content.
More than half of political content came from accounts using extreme or hateful language and of that 72% came from the right.
Right wing figures, especially those aligned with Musk, appeared far more than their posting frequency justified.
Rupert Lowe’s content: 6% of posts he made translated into 24% of what users saw.
Analysts conclude that this bias is must be influenced by senior leadership.
Twitter has known for a long time now that outrage equals engagement, engagement equals revenue and the contemporary right-wing does outrage like Amazon does logistics.
The machine was not broken or malfunctioning - it has always been working exactly the way it was meant to and has been humming away, with all of us acting as the conveyor belt.
If you have ever tried to say something considered on X - think along the lines of a paragraph with clauses, a link to a hard-hitting report, a chart that hasn’t been made in MS Paint - you’ll have felt the physics of this happening. Your posts trudge uphill in ankle weights, while right next to you a GB News broadcaster’s post calling Rachel Reeves “Rachel from Accounts” seems to slide down greased marble.
Because in the world of Twitter, a sneer is lighter than an argument, and the platform served as an oxygen tent for anything that raises the pulse and a smothering pillow for anything that asks the reader to just sit still for thirty seconds and pay attention.
The pattern is there, and once you start noticing it - like really, really noticing it - it becomes near impossible to unsee. Without even seeing the quantitative data, you can feel the bias baked into the foundation of the system - the right coughs, and the algorithm clears its throat; the left shouts and the platform lowers the mic.
And I’m not working myself into a semi-rant here because of paranoia, bitterness or the nursing of an old grudge because a thread about childhood malnutrition didn’t trend - I’m annoyed at the fact that it’s been proven to be engineered. Structured.
I have said many times before that outrage is the business model of modern social media - not a bug, side-effect or unintended consequence, it is the entire premise. Rage is the renewable energy that makes these platforms go, and X has turned that into a science by making that fury positively frictionless.
Because outrage, beyond being cheap to manufacture, is even cheaper to spread. There’s no need for nuance, expertise or verification - just velocity. The right discovered this well before Musk walked into Twitter HQ with his sink in his arms, desperate to land a pun - but under his direction, the rage factory has been well and thoroughly industrialised. You don’t need to win an argument anymore, all you need to do is make sure that everyone hears you shout first before the facts have a chance to catch up.
And it works - my god, it works. You can see in real time how the most deranged posts instantly rise to the surface like grease on broth - a GB News clip, a Reform UK meme, a confused blurt by Rupert Lowe, a think-tank intern pretending to be Churchill6 clearly wearing his dad’s blazer - all buoyed by the same algorithmic tail wind.
Their ideas don’t have to be more popular (or even make sense), they just need to be more portable - and that portability is achieved by stripping everything that slows them down, like empathy, context accuracy and, in many cases, spelling.
We on the left, on the other hand, have to constantly drag our principles uphill with us like a modern-day Sisyphus. We do our best to persuade, show our homework, caveat, qualify and contextualise - which is to say that we make content that algorithms despise. X generously rewards shouting over thinking7, certainty over honesty and confidence over competence.
Which is how we all ended up, while still there, with fees that are basically the drunk table at a wedding given global reach and push notifications.
When I first created my Bearish account two and a bit years ago on the site, you could still squint and sort of still see some redeeming features in all the chaos - it was part of the bargain for joining. Yes, it was an unholy mess, but it was an interesting mess. From time to time, you would stumble into actual experts, find solidarity with your people and even occasionally learn something.
There was an understanding, even if unspoken, that while Twitter was a brawl, it was at least to a certain extent a fair one. That is all now fully gone. The ring has been tilted, the referee has been bought, the safety team has been given the boot and the crowd is now full of robots wailing about Marxism because a woman on the telly said “children deserve to not go hungry.”
The research from Sky that came out today just confirms what all of us who lived on Twitter knew for years - that none of it was organic, and neither was it accident. The “free speech” that Musk promised when he bought the biggest social media platform in the world, was really just freedom for billionaires and their mates to shout louder and to manipulate the conversation ever more effectively. His fan base told us that there would be a noble restoration of balance, but what really happened was the megaphone was handed to the worst people in the room with the volume amped to full8.
For someone who thoroughly enjoyed Twitter, it’s been a bit like watching a local council tear down a library because the shout from its constituents was that it was “good for engagement.”
I have always been tempted to just dismiss it as culture war - but I’m afraid it is more serious than that. There is now a full infrastructure built around this under the guise of Musk-the-Megalomaniac. X has stopped being a platform, and is now a vector for mis- and disinformation.
We have all seen it happen in real time - a fake state, a cropped video, a vaguely worded “if true” followed by a statement that almost certainly isn’t, and suddenly policy starts shifting to match the online mood. Ministers are nudged by hashtags while headlines chase tweets. “The conversation” - that vague, sort of pompous term we us to mean national discourse - is happening inside an app that now ranks unhinged paranoia above reasoned debate nearly every time.
When a space like X becomes the de facto newswire for government, media and voters, it transcends being just another website, and it becomes a threat. Not a metaphorical “we should really keep an eye on that, there may be some risk involved”, but an actual “holy shit, this could topple governments if we don’t rein it in” level of threat.
When an algorithm decides who gets heard, we are, in effect, handing over full editorial control of the public square to an unregulated advertising mechanism. It will get to the point where dictators won’t even need to rig elections - a cosying up to the right (far-right) billionaire can just make sure that anyone trying to discuss social housing, institutional failures or authoritarian threats gets instantly outperformed by a man shouting “GROOMER” in 72-point all caps.
An issue like this simply cannot be out-debated, and neither can you fix it with media literacy or the farting against thunder that is the community notes system within X - not when the system is doing exactly what it was built to do - harvest attention, monetise anger and funnel the proceeds into the pockets of the exact same plutocrat who keeps telling you that free speech is sacred while banning words like “union.”
And still, despite all of this, a part of me does still miss it - not the bile, the cruelty and the distressing number of people who struggle with their/they’re/there. No - I miss the pulse of it - the addictive rhythm to the feed, the dopamine hit of being seen. I spent far too long telling myself I was immune to the allure of it - I was definitely not. None of us are.
This is the absolute genius of it - you get flattered with visibility while your participation gets weaponised. It turns you into the product and fuel - every like, argument, defensive reply (no matter how clever), becomes free energy for the outrage engine. It’s the same thing any exploitative system does - it makes you believe that you’re the one benefiting, while you’re being quietly drained9.
The further away I get from my leaving X, the more I feel like I’m standing over the smouldering wreckage of what used to be the “town square” and asking myself whether it’s even worth saving.
The answer?
It isn’t worth it. Let it burn. Let it burn all the way down.
What we’re left with has long not been the tool we thought it was - it’s nothing more than a toxin. It’s an incubator for cruelty masquerading as debate, extremism pretending its concern and a surveillance economy disguised as a community. Every inch of X has been gamified for outrage, and every fibre of its being now lives to only serve the whims of its ketamine-addled master and his other billionaire friends10.
“An algorithmic bias must be decided by senior people at the channel.” - Ned Mendez, data analyst
When you consider what would be lost by the wholesale destruction of what was once a social media site - journalists harassed into silence, minorities targeted for sport, truth itself rewritten in real time by trolls with blue ticks - it’s staggering how complacent we’ve become to its very existence. “That’s just social media”, people will say, making an excuse for it and making out that it’s fine. It’s not fine.
If I’m sounding a bit melodramatic, that’s because we’ve normalised the absurdity. We shouldn’t be blase about a platform that can swing elections, amplify hate crimes and convince millions of people around the world that facts are subjective. None of this is hyperbole - it’s documented. Look at Brazil, India, the US and even here in the UK. X has become the constant infrastructure and purveyor of disinformation and hate, and has moved from being in the background news of our politics and turned into the PA system.
“The platform’s influence on Britain’s streets is no longer subtle - it’s stark and unmistakable.” - Sky News Investigation
I don’t want to save it. I don’t want to “fix” it, rehabilitate it or politely request that we all behave better. You don’t patch an infection, you get rid of it with antibiotics. You don’t debate with asbestos, you destroy it.
We have made the mistake of confusing scale with importance - just because it’s big, doesn’t mean it’s necessary, and just because everyone is on there, doesn’t mean it’s good.
So, yes - burn the damned thing to the ground and salt the earth. Not out of vengeance, but out of mercy. Mercy for the people who still think they can fix it. Mercy for those of us who wasted years of our lives shouting into a void that was designed to echo the worst bits back to us louder. Mercy for whatever’s left of the public square.
And when it finally goes dark - when the servers wind down and go quiet and the hate merchants all scatter and scurry to the next shiny platform promising “uncensored truth” - maybe then we’ll remember what human conversations used to sound like.
Maybe then we can even start again.
If this small nervous breakdown about social media resonated (or at least made you feel slightly better about your own doomscrolling), Bearly Politics is full of equally unnecessary but hopefully entertaining dives into political and media nonsense.
If you are in a position to do so, a paid subscription is what keeps the juices flowing (20% off annual subscriptions this week).
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Whether big in the form of my MacBook resting on my lap, medium from my iPad balanced precariously on my chest or small in the form of my phone cradled in that claw thing your hand does.
In all fairness “Don’t trust the lizards” was at least an ethos.
Otherwise known as the “three F’s” of modern British political journalism.
My account does still exist because I’m not too keen on someone knicking my usernames to do mischief with.
Though still not with enough lumination to show what the man is actually for beyond just shouting at migrants.
“We shall post them on the timelines…”
In effect becoming the Liz Truss of social media sites.
Honestly, you can hear the Daily Mail’s erection from here.
Also see: Any modern dating app.
If Ayn Rand had written Toy Story, this would have been the plot.
That Sky investigation was excellent, should be beamed onto every TV in the land for an entire day.
All MPs from progressive parties (Labour, Lib Dem, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru) need to get off X now.