Twitter Admits Algorithm Helps Amplify Right Wing Content

An internal investigation at Twitter has revealed that their algorithm has been promoting right wing content for years, proving that conservatives whining about censorship were absolutely full of it. The company acknowledged the problem and said that they are going to start opening up their data for outside companies to examine, and hopefully they can correct this issue as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

I'm being shadow banned. Oh, they're silencing conservative voices. Social media, big tech companies are squarely in the pocket of the liberals and the Democrats in this country. How many times have we heard those claims over the last couple years, right? Too many to even be able to count coming from politicians of all shapes and sizes over on the Republican side, right? Not to mention all the little pundits, the Fox news hosts, the Newsmax hosts, all of them claiming that social media sites, especially Twitter, was somehow punishing conservatives. Well, according to an internal audit released last week by Twitter, um, that's all not true. And in fact, the algorithm for some reason, because they don't know why, but the algorithm is actually promoting right-wing content on Twitter far more than it is promoting left-wing content. Fox news posts are some of the most popular on Twitter because of their algorithm.

They actually mentioned that in their little report. They're getting more engagements. It's getting more likes. It's getting more shares. It's getting out in front of more people than anything, than literally anything, on the left. So all of those claims of shadow banning, all of those claims of big tech companies having some kind of liberal bias, it's all bull crap and Twitter's own internal data proved it. Twitter now says they're going to open up some of their internal data. Obviously they don't want anybody to have access to usernames, passwords, personal information, things like that. But they're going to open up the algorithm type stuff to outside companies now so that these outside companies can help them. They can look at this and maybe they can fix it. But Twitter itself admitted, like, we don't know why the algorithm is doing this. We don't know why our website is promoting all of this right-wing content, instead of all the left-wing content, it just is.

So, so what do we do then Twitter? You're going to open it up to people, fantastic. What are they going to do? Are you going to listen to the recommendations? What I think has happened here is that Twitter tried to over-correct much like Facebook did because this is exactly what we saw with Facebook, by the way. Facebook got accused of silencing conservative voices and promoting liberal voices, which never actually happened. So Facebook tweaked their algorithm a little bit and it began to benefit right-wing sources and it downplayed left-wing sources. Left-wing sources got fewer views, fewer clicks, fewer shares and the right-wing side went up because Facebook wanted to over-correct to avoid any kind of claims of left-wing bias. And I think the exact same thing happened with Twitter. But there could be other possible explanations for some of this.

Some of it has to do with the fact that a lot of people on the left, and I'm occasionally guilty of this as well, we amplify stuff from the right, you know, we'll tweet something out or retweet something from Fox news and say how stupid it is. We'll retweet a right-wing politician or a right-wing pundit saying something stupid and we call them out for those things. But that is amplification and I am exceptionally guilty of that with regards to really only just Ted Cruz.