X’s feed pushed more conservative posts. Did it change users’ views?

A seven-week randomized experiment found shifts in some political opinions among U.S. X users. It did not find a change in party identity or affective polarization.

Two people can open X at the same moment and see different worlds. The “For You” feed chooses and orders posts; “Following” is chronological. A recent Nature study asked a harder question than “what appears on screen?”: can that difference change what people think about politics?

Researchers randomly assigned active U.S. X users to an algorithmic or chronological feed for seven weeks in summer 2023. The main analysis included 4,965 people who completed the study. It was conducted independently of X and published in Nature in 2026.

The feeds did differ. Posts labeled conservative were more likely to appear in the algorithmic feed, while posts from traditional news organizations appeared less often and posts from political activists more often. The paper reports a 15.5-percentage-point drop in news-organization posts and a 5.9-point increase in political-activist posts.

Some views shifted too. Participants who switched from the chronological feed to “For You” moved in a more conservative direction on selected policy priorities and current political questions, including views about the criminal investigations into Donald Trump and the war in Ukraine. The researchers did not find a significant change in self-reported party identity or affective polarization. Switching the algorithm off did not produce a matching reversal during the study.

This does not mean X made everyone more conservative. The study tested active U.S. users in 2023; it did not establish the same effect for today’s feed, other countries or other apps.

Source: Nature (2026).