Studies Show Social Media Slants for Republicans
Now we have hard data. At the end of the article are legislative moves we need to support. I will be posting these remedies in the Activist Forum and other appropriate forums. In addition, I will be making up my own handout and taking it to demonstrations I attend, which I do on a weekly basis.
TikTok, Meta, Google/Youtube: all are guilty. Read examples of what they did both below and at the link.
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A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.
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TikTok:
Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day. Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side.
Meta/Zuckerberg:
Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. After spending a decade telling Congress that Meta was politically neutral, Zuckerberg watched Trump win, metaphorically dropped to his knees, and immediately killed the fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram that kept identifying and calling out Trump’s and Republicans’ lies and misrepresentations.
Google/YouTube:
YouTube — also largely owned and run by right-wing billionaires — isn’t innocent either. A UC Davis audit using 100,000 sock-puppet accounts found that right-leaning users get systematically funneled into channels pushing rightwing extremism, conspiracy theories, and hard-right “otherwise problematic content,” while left-leaning users see nothing comparable.
Read the article by Thom Hartman.
There is a sizable section on the damage Musk did in the article, too.
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