(ORDO NEWS) — A study by American scientists showed that a popular social network makes news from conservative users more visible than from liberals.
Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and other American organizations analyzed social media activity on the topic of one of the largest protests in the United States – after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer on May 25, 2020.
The experts studied content from 1.3 million tweets, protest data collected by the Crowd Counting Consortium, and web browsing information.
The researchers wanted to compare what was happening on the streets with the information spread via Twitter.
In addition, the scientists were faced with the task of determining the political bias of the news published on the platforms that covered the protests.
To do this, they determined the ideological composition of the audience consuming such news. In addition, the researchers analyzed the links to which the tweets led.
It turned out that most of the sources that users shared on Twitter during the protests in the United States led to right-wing domains.
There were more such tweets in general, and users reacted to them more often than to left-wing platforms.
References to publications with a conservative bias, in principle, were distributed more often than those with a liberal one.
It would seem that this should mean that users of the social network simply have a conservative bias.
However, earlier studies have shown that those who sit on Twitter, on the contrary, are more likely to sympathize with liberal views.
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