Declining information quality under new platform governance

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

• How has the overall information quality changed on Twitter/X following the ownership transition?
• How has the market share of low- and high-quality sources changed on the platform overall, and for U.S. voters in particular, surrounding the ownership change of Twitter/X on October 27, 2022?

ESSAY SUMMARY

• This study investigates changes in information quality on Twitter/X in the period before and after the ownership transition on October 27, 2022, drawing on two datasets: the Twitter panel (representative sample of U.S. voters) and the Decahose sample (a global 10% random sample).
• We applied NewsGuard reliability scores, which assess the trustworthiness of online news and information sources, to the domains linked in URLs shared by users in our dataset. This allowed us to analyze the quality of information circulating on the platform before and after the acquisition.
• Analysis revealed a post-acquisition decline in information quality across both datasets, marked by an increase in the share of content from low-quality sources and a corresponding decrease in high-quality sources. While low-quality sources continued to account for a relatively small percentage of posts on the platform, their proportion increased relative to the period before Musk took over Twitter.
• The findings emphasize the critical role of ownership and governance in determining information quality in sociotechnical systems.

‍