A toy to spot your bias on Twitter

Tyler Cowen writes,

What is the ideological news slant of your Twitter account? (mine was 57% left-wing, 34% right-wing, not too many centrists, at least by their measures, maybe I prefer “the kooks”). I don’t wish to embarrass anyone in particular, but some of the ideological bubbles you can find with this are…just remarkable.

I put in klingblog, and it says I do not interact enough with Twitter to give a reading. Check.

I put in econtalker (Russ Roberts) and it said 48 percent left, 44 percent right.

I put in slatestarcodex (Scott Alexander) and it said 71 percent left, 15 percent right.

My thoughts.

1. I think that Twitter overall leans very far to the left. So my guess is that this measure overstates the amount of leftwing news and understates the amount of rightwing news that a person gets in the “real world.”

2. I suspect that if you are active on Twitter and interested in political issues, you have no choice but to interact with a lot of news from the left. For a long time I have believed that those of us on the right know what the leftwing narrative is on news. But people on the left miss some angles on stories and some stories altogether because these analyses never penetrate their bubble.

7 thoughts on “A toy to spot your bias on Twitter

  1. “I suspect that if you are active on Twitter and interested in political issues, you have no choice but to interact with a lot of news from the left.”

    I politely disagree. I’ve created a fairly good right-of-center bubble for myself. I cannot check my stats in the bias tool since my account is marked private (and I never actively tweet on the platform), but I’m guessing 70% right-of-center and 30% to the other side.

    I follow 150+, but here are my favorites right now (among active tweeters):

    Wilfred Reilly
    Brit Hume
    Chris Rufo
    Sarah Haider
    Zaid Jilani
    Matt Walsh
    Ben Shapiro
    Toxic Centrism
    Bo Winegard
    Steve Sailer

    Plenty of FIT picks on my list, but seriously how did Winegard and Jilani not get drafted?

      • Give that search bar in the upper right portion of this page a try sometime (at your leisure). Both Jilani and Winegard have been featured on this blog, although I discovered them first over on Twitter.

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