Emrys Schoemaker

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to...

The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech.”

Ireland, Finland, others warn against relaxing EU merger rules Finland, Ireland, the Czech Republic and two Baltic countries have warned against loosening EU merger rules in response to calls by some companies for easier regulatory scrutiny of their deals in orde...

The Small States’ Antitrust Phalanx? www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

From Citizen Ideas to Bills Inside Brazil’s Senate’s New System for Linking Public Input to Lawmaking

"By connecting the citizens’ idea database directly to the workflow of the Senate’s Legislative Consultancy, the tool transforms a largely underused archive into a resource for drafting bills" modparl.substack.com/p/from-citiz...

Switzerland to host 2027 world summit on artificial intelligence Switzerland will host the next World Summit on Artificial Intelligence in Geneva in 2027, President Guy Parmelin announced on Thursday in New Delhi during the 2026 AI Summit.

Bravo #Switzerland: to host the next #AI Summit

This is great overview of key data governance terms and ideas:

Blog - Open Data Policy Lab

Data governance without the jargon: 30 questions and answers to clarify terms and trends opendatapolicylab.org/articles/new...

Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous opinion: The subtractive bias we're ignoring

“A jpeg of thought”

“What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.”

The WhatsApp moment for money is here This is the year that stablecoins are becoming part of the mainstream for online and international payments

😂

“The writer is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and leads its crypto investment arm”

The WhatsApp moment for money is here

Google sent personal and financial information of student journalist to ICE | TechCrunch The tech giant handed over the personal information of a journalist and student who attended a pro-Palestinian protest in 2024. This is the latest example of ICE using its controversial subpoena power...

More reports of Gmail turning over email content to ICE are coming out now.
techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/g...

“I now had to meticulously fact-check every single thing in the articles. And at least 60% of it would be completely made up,” she says. “I would just end up rewriting most of the article. So something that would take me two hours now took me four hours, making half the money.”

AI coding makes you worse at learning — and not even any faster Here’s a new preprint from Anthropic: “How AI Impacts Skill Formation”. AI coding bots make you bad at learning, and don’t even speed you up. [arXiv] The researchers ran 50 test subjects through fi…

AI coding makes you worse at learning — and not even any faster pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/06/a...

cognitive sovereignty....

#sovereigntystack - from individual, to state…

Love this:

💯

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consisten...

Relatedly came across this with similar findings.

hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

I’d argue driven also by development organizations need to have solutions that obviate the difficult work of engaging with politics and power

The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most | TechCrunch Because employees could do more, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees' to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

Sigh, twas ever thus:

“You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

AI Is Here to Replace Nuclear Treaties. Scared Yet? The last major nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia just expired. Some experts believe a combination of satellite surveillance, AI, and human reviewers can take its place. Others, not so much...

AI Is Here to Replace Nuclear Treaties. Scared Yet? | WIRED

Indian police commissioner wants ID cards for AI agents Asia In Brief: PLUS: China broadens cryptocurrency crackdown; Australian facial recognition privacy revisited; Singapore debuts electric VTOL; and more!

For all the talk about agents as the future (state, personal productive blah blah blah) we've yet to solve for the basic authorisation / verification / accountability identity chain:

Indian police commissioner wants ID cards for AI agents • The Register

"The council argues that selling property to fund an IT project, which would ordinarily be paid for using ongoing revenue, is justified because long-term savings are expected through "automation and enabling more tasks to be undertaken via self-service,"

🙄😐🤯🤬

UK council dips into capital assets to fund Oracle project : West Sussex plans to triple use of property sales as ERP budget blows past original estimates

UK council dips into capital assets to fund Oracle project • The Register

Counting the waves of tech industry BS from blockchain to AI Opinion: After decades in the trenches, this engineer is done with hype cycles

Counting the waves of tech industry BS from blockchain to AI • The Register