Taipei, Taiwan – Scrolling through Twitter over the past few weeks, Sarah Hurst, an independent journalist based in the UK, began noticing changes in the way the platform portrayed certain government and media accounts.
Hurst, who writes about Russia and Ukraine, started seeing more tweets from Russian government accounts, Russian state media and government spokespersons on her “For You” tab.
Twitter launched the tab in January as the new default view for users, displaying algorithmically selected tweets along with those from accounts the user follows.
“Previously, in your settings you could choose to organize tweets by ‘top tweets’ or chronologically in your news feed. I was mostly on top tweets so I didn’t miss the biggest news stories,” Hurst told Al Jazeera.
“Every time I open ‘For You,’ I see a stream of Russian and Chinese government propaganda reports.”
“I campaigned against [Russian President Vladimir] Putin since annexing Crimea in 2014,” Hurst added.
Whether by accident or on purpose, Twitter is giving more attention to government and state media accounts often criticized for spreading disinformation, such as Russia’s RT and China’s Global Times.
The changes appear to include subtle boosts to state-affiliated accounts, as well as more prominent placement in users’ feeds.
In a Substack post last month, Wenhao Ma, a reporter for the US government-funded Voice of America, said the top search results for Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s name and the phrase “US-China” were posts from Chinese state media denouncing Tsai and the US government.
The latest changes at the social media giant, which has undergone significant upheaval since its takeover by billionaire tech leader Elon Musk, has sparked concerns among journalists and scholars about disinformation – as well as a wider debate about what counts as disinformation or propaganda and who may decide.
Some analysts argue that the apparent changes to Twitter’s algorithm have troubling implications for public discourse, democracy and the future of the platform itself.
“Clearly the algorithm has changed and what counts as ‘to you’ has changed,” Darren Linvill, an associate professor at Clemson University in South Carolina who studies social media disinformation, told Al Jazeera.
“Historically, Twitter has been very good at only giving people things they are vaguely looking for, so I think a normal person would be surprised that most of Twitter is a combination of K-Pop and porn. And it didn’t give you that. Elon is trying to shake things up and it’s clear he’s messing with an algorithm they’ve been developing for over a decade to give people what they want.”
Timothy Graham, a senior lecturer in digital media at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), said the site’s recommendations were now “a bit out of control” compared to the more curated approach of the past.
“Some people see harmful wartime propaganda regarding the war in Ukraine coming from Russia and government ministers, or from diplomatic accounts, or from Russia Today,” Graham said.
Before Musk bought Twitter last October, the platform had taken steps to narrow the reach of certain state-affiliated accounts.
In 2020, Twitter introduced the label “state-affiliated media”, which it defines as “points of sale where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial means, direct or indirect political pressure, and/or control over production and distribution”.
In practice, this label was applied almost exclusively to Russian and Chinese government media accounts, although Twitter initially said the label would be rolled out to media from the five countries that sit on the United Nations Security Council: China, Russia , France, the United States and the UK.
The platform’s guidelines ultimately ruled out outlets such as the BBC in the UK and National Public Radio, also known as NPR, in the US, both of which receive government funding but are widely regarded as editorially independent.
However, those rules change – sometimes almost daily.
Last week, Musk seemed to change Twitter’s definition of “state-affiliated media” by briefly adding the label to NPR, an outlet that right-wing Americans often accuse of having a liberal bias.
The label was removed within days after backlash from critics defending NPR’s record of editorial independence and noting that government funding accounts for only 2 percent of the outlet’s budget, though some US conservatives and Chinese state media employees welcomed the state media tag.
Twitter instead added a new “government-funded media” label to NPR’s account.
The designation, which has also been applied to the BBC, PBS and Voice of America in recent days, refers to “outlets where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government interference with editorial content.”
The new label has not been added to some other state-funded media, including Al Jazeera and France 24, which are funded by the Qatari and French governments respectively.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
But in an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, Musk said: “We want it to be as truthful and accurate as possible – we’re adjusting the label”[the BBC being] publicly funded – we’ll try to be accurate.
Earlier this week, Musk was quoted telling one of the NPR reporters, “If you really think the government has no influence over the entity they’re funding, then you’ve been marinating in the Kool-Aid for too long.”
Taken together, the changes on Twitter make it easier to spread propaganda and “fake news” about current events, including major conflicts like the war in Ukraine, said Graham, the QUT lecturer.
“Some of them are conspiracy theories about neo-Nazis taking over Ukraine. They are all trying to justify and give this narrative justification for what Russia is doing, and they are all trying to appeal to the public that will somehow empower them,” he said.
“It’s not this kind of hypodermic model like they inject you with false information, and then you believe it and you start spreading it,” Graham added.
“But it is more than getting into a situation where these false and misleading stories pollute and only cause chaos…[and] are oxygenated by the rest of the media ecosystem. When that happens, it is essentially payday for the state media.”