One of the reasons for the crisis of credibility in much of journalism is the publication of sensationalist headlines.<\/p>\n
Today, the newspaper El Mundo published this headline: \"Neither 'fake news' nor muting accounts: this is how Elon Musk's social network X gets you to become right-wing without you realizing it\"<\/em><\/a>. This is an example of what is known on the Internet as \"clickbait,\" a lure published by a media outlet to generate traffic. The article discusses a study by a Russian professor, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya<\/strong>, who works at the Paris School of Economics. The study was published by Nature, and El Mundo reports on it: \"For seven weeks, the researchers manipulated precisely that element: some participants saw a chronological feed, without recommendations<\/strong>; others, the usual algorithmic feed that orders content according to the likelihood of user interaction.\"<\/em><\/p>\n Despite its headline, the El Mundo article states: \"The shift was not radical nor did it transform the declared ideological identity of the users; that is, nobody changed parties by using the algorithm.<\/strong>\"<\/em> The penultimate paragraph of the article confirms that the headline is a hoax:<\/p>\n \"Neither in the United States nor in Spain does the available evidence allow us to affirm that an algorithm determines the vote or fundamentally transforms the ideology of citizens.<\/strong> But it does suggest something more subtle and perhaps more relevant: that the system decides which issues occupy the center of the debate, which voices seem to be in the majority, and which interpretive frameworks are repeated every day on millions of screens.\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This last sentence is rather amusing. Nine years ago, the leftist media outlet Eldiario.es published a study showing that journalism is one of the professions most biased towards the left<\/a>. This explains why leftist ideological positions are dominant in most media outlets. This also happens in El Mundo<\/strong>, a newspaper that has been defending progressive positions for many years. Media outlets that share this ideology filter it through their news daily, clearly influencing public opinion. However, this progressive journalism is bothered because an opposing trend exists on a very specific social network.<\/strong><\/p>\n An example of the subtle, insidious influence the media exerts on us regarding political and ideological issues can be seen in another article published five days ago by the same author of that news item<\/a>, in which he stated that the rise of the right-wing Vox party in the polls \"should become a matter of utmost concern for Spaniards\"<\/em><\/strong>. Many journalists have spent decades telling us what we should or shouldn't vote for, what we should think, even what we should eat and whether or not we should have children, but then they are scandalized when an algorithm indicates that public opinion trends differ from their own.<\/strong><\/p>\n In addition, El Mundo has failed to mention a detail from Zhuravskaya's study<\/strong> (can be read here<\/a>). This researcher points out the following in the Nature publication:<\/p>\n \"An earlier study examined changes in the content of users\u2019 feeds on Twitter, when the platform introduced the feed algorithm in 2016<\/strong>, well before Musk\u2019s takeover, and found that the algorithm already prioritized right-wing content, despite different platform ownership.<\/strong>\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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