How the richest man is boosting the British right (news.sky.com)

A nine‑month Sky News Data & Forensics investigation finds X’s recommendation system systematically amplifies right‑wing and extreme UK content. Researchers created nine new British personas (three left, three right, three neutral), scraped roughly 90,000 “For You” posts from ~22,000 accounts, and hand‑classified ~6,000 high‑impact authors. Results show over half of political content shown came from accounts labelled “extreme,” 72% of which were right‑leaning, and some politicians were over‑represented (e.g., Rupert Lowe accounted for 24% of politician posts shown despite only 6% of total posts). Direct engagement from Elon Musk correlates with large visibility boosts (Lowe’s tweets saw a ~5× uplift after Musk interacted). Technically, the investigation highlights opaque algorithmic decisioning despite X posting a version of its code on GitHub; experts say the repo doesn’t reveal ranking or signal weighting. X says it will move to a fully AI‑powered recommender, offer dynamic personalization via its Grok tool, and periodically open‑source the system, but independent auditing remains limited. Former staffers link post‑acquisition layoffs and the loss of curation teams to weaker moderation; Community Notes is used but is slow to contain harms. The findings raise practical and democratic concerns: platform design and leadership choices can bias amplification, drive real‑world political traction, and polarize discourse.