“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – Confucius
“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius
Down Under Bad Bunny Touches Down in Sydney – and Heads Straight for a breakfast at Darlinghurst Cafe - The Rusty Rabbit …
The political effects of X’s feed algorithm
Gauthier, G., Hodler, R., Widmer, P. et al. The political effects of X’s feed algorithm. Nature(2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 – The political effects of X’s feed algorithm. 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.
DOJ Scrubs Record of Interviews With Trump Accuser From Epstein Files
Follow up to Epsteinalysis.com via The New Republic: “The Department of Justice spoke four separate times to a woman who credibly accused Donald Trump of having sex with a minor he met through Jeffrey Epstein—but most accusations against the president appear to have been removed from the government’s documents on the alleged sex trafficker.
A 21-page slideshow buried in the massive trove of Epstein-related documents included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985,
Trump forced a woman to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens. When the woman bit down on Trump’s exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. That same woman told the DOJ that Epstein had introduced her to Trump in 1984…”