Elon Musk, owner and Chief Technology Officer of the social media platform X, still has work to do.
According to a remarkable and unnerving study by the Media Research Center, Musk’s oft-stated and apparently sincere desire to transform X into a bastion of free speech has produced no meaningful improvement in the platform’s algorithm, which amplifies elected leftists and throttles their conservative counterparts.
MRC credited Musk with having “made strides” toward free speech. But data collected by MRC researchers suggested that “remnants of the Old Twitter censorship regime” remain.
Between July 1 and 2, MRC researchers used Grok, X’s AI search assistant, to conduct eight tests designed to determine how the platform assigns visibility scores for members of Congress. That matters because the visibility score dictates which accounts X boosts and which accounts it suppresses.
In short, the tests found that congressional visibility scores depended on four weighted factors: Mass Appeal (38 percent), Reputation (30 percent), Toxicity (21 percent), and Follow (11 percent).
