Neutral Bots Reveal Political Bias on Social Media
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Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots on Twitter to probe biases that may emerge from interactions between user actions, platform mechanisms, and manipulation by inauthentic actors. We find evidence of bias affecting the news and information to which U.S. Twitter users are likely to be exposed, depending on their own political alignment. Partisan accounts, especially conservative ones, tend to receive more followers, follow more automated accounts, are exposed to more low-credibility content, and find themselves in echo chambers. Liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content shifting their experience toward the political center, while the interactions of conservative accounts are skewed toward the right. We find weak evidence of liberal bias in the news feed ranking algorithm for conservative accounts. These findings help inform the public debate about how social media shape exposure to political information.
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