Twitter can often feel like ground zero in the information battle between those on the left and right of the political spectrum. Research from the University of Pennsylvania highlights how the different sides deploy different tactics on the platform, while their audiences are also different in terms of their susceptibility to the information being shared.

The researchers analyzed data from the summer of 2020, when extensive Black Lives Matter protests were emerging in the real world and intense debate raged about them online. The analysis found that Twitter appeared to give more visibility to politically conservative news than that of a more liberal bent.

“We were surprised,” the researchers explain. “Previous work has documented that Twitter users tend to have a liberal bias. But we found that across the board, the news most often shared has a right-leaning bias. This increases the visibility of conservative voices, even in the context of protest mobilizations with liberal goals.”

Political bias

The researchers examined around 1.3 million tweets as well as protest event data that had been collected by the Crowd Counting Consortium. They also measured web-browsing data to understand the estimated reach of content and also audience-based ideology scores, alongside news source reliability from tech company NewsGuard.

They were particularly keen to understand whether what was happening on the streets matched up with the information that was flowing across Twitter. They were also keen to explore the political slant of any news shared on the platform.

“Most of the sources being shared on Twitter as these events unfolded lead to right-leaning domains. You don’t have an equivalent on the left,” the researchers explain. “And it’s not only about the number of messages containing URLs; that’s one measure we use, showing that there are more URLs pointing to right-leaning domains. It is also about engagement. Users reacted more frequently to right-leaning sources.”

The researchers believe that their findings reinforce the views of many on the left that there is a right-wing bias online, even surrounding causes, such as Black Lives Matter, that is more left leaning.

“We still care about misinformation, and we should absolutely fight it,” the authors conclude. “But, if these sites are giving more visibility to one side of the ideological divide, we also need to know that and to understand the consequences.”