Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, Tesla has become…
The most obvious changes the CEO made to the social network were small and cosmetic: changing the logo, changing the name, and squeezing revenue out of the familiar blue check marks.
This is largely because large changes are difficult to measure. Many users who celebrated Twitter before Musk arrived may feel that X, formerly Twitter, is no longer the place for them, but they can't explain why.
Some users say that X does not moderate the content and does not pay attention to the facts. Users have also reported an increase in anti-Semitic and racist content, with many saying the social media platform has “become more aggressive.”
To test whether this subjective assessment is evidence-based or anecdotal, we conducted a study. We collected Twitter data before and after Musk's October 2022 purchase was completed to test the hypothesis that the network is now less fact-based. Using data on engagement with posts, it's possible to identify which voices are dominating the conversation and which voices are losing influence.
The data is clear: the face of X-Twitter is changing, and not for the better. X's user base is now less interested in unbiased facts, with fact-checkers and unbiased media accounts receiving 52% and 27% fewer interactions, respectively. Less trustworthy sources receive more attention – for example, sites like The Joe Rogan Experience and Breitbart News increased user engagement by 22%.
“We used Twitter's Academic Research API to extract 16 months of tweets from thousands of media outlets. “
Let us define our study. In May 2023, we used Twitter's Academic Research API to extract 16 months of tweets from thousands of media outlets, covering the period from January 1, 2022 to April 30, 2023 (changes to the API since then make it difficult to collect additional data ). We focused on outlets with MediaBias/FactCheck (MBFC) labels, which classify them into five political categories (less biased, left-biased, left-biased, right-biased, and right-biased) and four scientific categories (pro-science, right-biased). conspiracy, pseudoscience, satire, and questionable sources), based on levels of potential bias and misinformation.
To measure engagement, which is the best metric for determining which stories are being amplified on the platform, we quantified the number of times a single tweet @ or hashtag (#) was repeated by Twitter users using the Twitter Count API Endpoint. For example, a tweet from Snopes, a fact-checking outlet, might generate 247 replies, replies, and retweets, each of which forms an @ or #.
Of the 4,844 media outlets listed by the MBFC, we studied all 3,852 outlets that had Twitter accounts. We focus on comparing the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023 in our analyzes so that the unusual election period in November 2022 cannot explain the results; All of the results mentioned below hold even if we compare the entire pre-Mask and post-Mask data.
We checked that the number of posts from the average samples of these outlets did not change over the study period, and we control for the number of posts in our analysis to ensure that it does not fully explain changes in engagement.
3 main meals
We highlight three key points from our study that show how X-Twitter fundamentally changed for users after Musk's purchase: On Elon Musk's (And interact less with less biased media.)
First, we found a significant decline in engagement with fact-checkers and fact-checking sites like Snopes, PolitiFact, and OpenSecrets.org. Prior to Musk's acquisition of the company in 2022, the average interaction with fact-checkers' accounts on Twitter was 76.9 per account per day (Q1 2022). Following Musk's acquisition a year later, in 2023, this number fell by 52% to 36.9 (Q1 2023). More than half of the thirteen fact-checkers saw a significant decline in engagement levels, and eight showed a statistically significant decline. Although the number of fact-checkers' posts also decreased from 8.28 to 5.99 per account per day, this does not fully explain the impact on engagement with posts.
Beyond fact-checkers, we also analyzed engagement with the media in general. Engagement with all 58 satire sites (such as The Onion) increased 32% to 82.6 per account per day from an average of 62.7 (Q1 2022 vs. Q1 2023). Comparing the same two quarters, engagement with all 199 conspiracy and pseudoscience accounts (such as ZeroHedge and DoctorOz.com) remained unchanged, to 89.9 from 90.7. However, there was a decline in engagement with all 176 pro-science accounts (e.g. Nature, WHO, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Engagement with these accounts fell 13% to 104.7 in Q1 2023 from an average of 119.9 per account per day in Q1 2022.
Finally, we found that users interact less with more balanced sources when grouping media according to their political stance. There is an increase in engagement with all 216 right-leaning media outlets (e.g., The Daily Wire and Daily Telegraph), from an average of 197.8 per account per day to 349.4, an increase of 77%, but no change in 308 media Left-leaning. (which remained at 363.1 on average).
At the same time, the data shows a decline in engagement with what the MBFC calls moderately center-right biased outlets (496 outlets, such as the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal), from 175.1 to 151.4, a decline of 14%, and 833 moderately left-wing outlets (New York Times, Washington Post, and Bloomberg News, for example), from 318.1 to 266.5, a decline of 16%. Engagement with the 1,081 media outlets rated as least biased (such as The Hill, Reuters, Sky News, The Economist) fell to 80.1 from 110.4, a drop of 27%.
“One possible reason people leave X: more extreme bias.“
A change in the conversation — increased engagement with more extreme elements and reduced engagement with fact-checkers and less biased media — may be one reason people leave the platform. An April 2021 poll — before Elon Musk — found that one in five American adults, or 23%, with a higher prevalence among the younger age group (42% of adults ages 18 to 29), said they had used Twitter. In September 2023, roughly a year after Musk purchased the platform, Variety reported that X-Twitter's monthly active users were down 15% worldwide and 18% in the United States. People currently on Twitter are less likely to engage with unbiased, fact-based media sources. Checks compared to people on Twitter before Musk bought.
X is in a transitional period. It will likely never cease to exist, although advertisers withdrawing their dollars may hasten its demise. As users change their relationship with the site, what was once a trusted public square is becoming more of a hotbed of conspiracy-fueled extremism.
Geeta Johar is the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a former associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. Yu Ding is an assistant professor of marketing at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
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