Twitter Recommender System Amplified Right-Leaning Tweets

February 10, 2016

An internal study by Twitter revealed a potential bias in its 'Home' timeline algorithm, amplifying tweets and news of right-wing politicians and organizations over left-wing ones in six out of seven studied countries.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.619, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.616, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.7 — similarity 0.608, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: twitter
Alleged developer: twitter
Alleged harmed parties: twitter-left-leaning-politicians, twitter-left-leaning-news-organizations, twitter-left-leaning-users, twitter-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/296

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

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McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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