Every leftist on X (formerly Twitter) seems to agree that the “hellsite” has become even more infernal under Elon Musk’s management, with right-wing content bombarding users on their “For You” pages. This vibe shift has some data behind it: a recent Washington Post report found that Republican elected officials are more likely to go viral than their Democratic peers and that conservative politicians have seen their follower counts skyrocket, while liberal accounts have been stagnant.

The big question around X’s rightward drift is why. Is Musk juicing the algorithm to promote conservative accounts, or are liberals just fleeing the site, leaving the timeline open for takeover by brash right-wing posters? It’s impossible to get a firm answer without access to the site’s data, yet Musk has indeed been caught several times with his thumb on the political scale. This October alone, the self-identified “free-speech absolutist” banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for publishing damaging information on J. D. Vance and commandeered the @america handle for his pro–Donald Trump super PAC. There’s evidence of a strong demographic transition too: the site’s user base has declined by an estimated 30% over the past year, as growing numbers of liberals flock to competitors like Threads and Bluesky.

But we should also ask whether Twitter was ever fair to the Left. Although Musk may have accelerated its right turn since he purchased the site in 2022, Twitter engineers had already concluded by 2021 that its algorithm systematically favored conservative parties. The researchers tracked the performance of tweets by legislators from across the political spectrum in seven countries: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the United States. In all but Germany, they discovered, posts from the Right were most likely to show up on users’ feeds.