"In the survey, conducted in January, X users were the only group in which a majority, just barely over 50 percent, expressed “strong” or “somewhat” approval of Donald Trump. His approval was significantly lower among consumers of news from “podcasts and YouTube,” local television, and even Facebook. Among people reading “newspapers or news websites,” browsing Reddit, watching broadcast television or scrolling TikTok or Instagram to keep up with current events, the numbers were, as Jain described them, “catastrophic.” He noted, “If you’re largely getting your news from Twitter, you might not even know that Trump is unpopular, because you wouldn’t even see a lot of the backlash.”

Last week, in a study published in Nature, a group of researchers attempted to answer a sensible follow-up question: So what? People organize around news sources that flatter their beliefs, and in a fragmented news environment, you would expect different attitudes to be associated with venues that have developed a clear partisan identity. Well, it turns out that the engine of Musk’s X — its algorithmic “For You” page — is an ideological ratchet..."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/x-really-is-pulling-users-to-the-right.html

#SocialMedia #Twitter #Algorithms #Polarization #RecommendationAlgorithms