Turning on the ‘for you’ feed on X shifted political opinions, but turning it off did not

Byline - A field experiment shows that turning on the algorithmic feed on the social-media platform X in 2023 shifted political opinions to the right, whereas turning it off had no effect on political attitudes. The algorithmic feed led users to follow more right-leaning accounts, which they continued following when the algorithm was off.

If you couldn't access the news article: one of the innovations was that the authors also continued to follow the users after the 7 weeks of the "experimental trial", and found that people still followed the same accounts, thus their political opinion shifts stuck around

The paper itself, open access & consists of only 4 easy-to-read main figures:

• Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. The political effects of X’s feed algorithm. Nature (2026): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2