The left keeps building media strategies on top of platforms built to undermine them. As browsers are rebuilt for mass surveillance and manipulation, the systems that decide what people see and who gets heard are being rewritten without us. Control over the browser is control over political reality.
SimPolitics
For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenw...
The political effects of X’s feed algorithm
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
The political effects of X’s feed algorithm
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
Custodians of the Internet
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...
The AI browser wars are about to begin
Artificial intelligence is already writing an obituary for the internet as we know it. So why is everyone building new web browsers?
Investing in what moves the internet forward | The Mozilla Blog
Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire and our independence shapes everything we build. This independence allows us to prioritize bu
How One 1990s Browser Decision Created Big Tech’s Data Monopolies (And How We Might Finally Fix It) - Above the Law
From the take-back-control dept
Big Tech tried to get young people addicted. Now we’re fighting back
Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi
Free Our Feeds
Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.
Social Media Effects: Hijacking Democracy and Civility in Civic Engagement
Perceived as an equalizing force for disenfranchised individuals without a voice, the importance of social networks as agents of change cannot be ignored. However, in some societies, social networks have evolved into a platform for fake news and propaganda, empowering disruptive voices, ideologies, and messages. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google hold the potential to alter civic engagement, thus essentially hijacking democracy, by influencing individuals toward a particular way of thinking.
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper describes how U.S. social media use has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans — especially the youngest and oldest cohorts — who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter/X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter/X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X lost ground, TikTok and Reddit grew modestly, consistent with a more fragmented digital public sphere. Platform audiences aged and became slightly more educated and racially diverse. Politically, most platforms shifted toward Republican users while remaining, on balance, Democratic-leaning. Twitter/X experienced the largest change: among posters, the partisan balance swung over 70 percentage points from Democrats to Republicans. Across platforms, political posting remains closely tied to affective polarization, as the most partisan respondents are also the most active. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme.
A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right-wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly
Elon Musk’s social media platform is boosting conservative content – and it’s having long-lasting effects on how users see the world.
A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right-wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly
Elon Musk’s social media platform is boosting conservative content – and it’s having long-lasting effects on how users see the world.
Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests
An investigation has exposed the tech firm’s cooperation with autocratic regimes to remove unfavourable content
Eaten by the Internet
This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
