Michael Morris - Director, Media Research Center Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, well EX is still shutting some people up six
twenty three, Star time here in Houston's Morning News, Jack Dorsey.
Maybe Jack Dorsey was just the tip of the iceberg,
because X is still boosting congressional Democrats and deed boosting Republicans.
Michael Morris joins US director of the Media Research Center.
This is after Elon Musk took over. I thought Elon

(00:20):
Musk was supposed to bring free speech back to X.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Good morning, thanks for having me on. And look, you
know it cannot be overstated enough what Elon Musk has
actually done for free speech in America. Remember, he did
purchase the platform from Jack Dorsey and the sensors there
at what was formally known as Twitter. He released the
Twitter Files, which showed government overreach in trying to pressure
big tech platforms to silence Americans, and then he also

(00:51):
reinstated prominent accounts on the platform like President doll Trust.
But yeah, our recent study actually shows that X is
still boosting congressional democrat and deep boosting Republicans. It's a
marked improvement from the same study that we ran last year.
But it looks like it's still happened.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Okay, so obviously there are still employees there that are
carrying the water jugs for the Democrats. What's the right
way to handle that. Do you go through and try
to figure out who it is that's doing this. Do
you take a look at the algorithms. Where do you
think this is stemming from?

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, it could be it could be Stage five cleaners,
at least that's what Senator Mike Lee caught him back
when he first asked this question last May. He said,
how long will it take to get rid of the
Stage five cleaners? That acts those who are still periodically
throttling conservatives. Elon Musk responded to him back then and said,
you know, neither conservative nor progressive should be throttled. The
point is to have an even playing field. And he's

(01:46):
absolutely right. It could be someone still hanging on to
the platform even into twenty twenty five that is doing
this sort of thing, or it might be Bacon the
algorithm still. So what we're asking for is we're asking
for Elon Musk to take a look at the algorithms,
take a look at his staff and say, okay, is
this still going on, because according to the research that
we've done using his algorithms, feeding it through his x

(02:07):
AI program called Rock. It's still happening at a clip
where Democrats in the House are getting twenty out of
the twenty five best scores, Republicans in the House are
getting twenty to twenty five lowest scores, and in the
Senate something similar is happening. It's slightly less drastic. Sixteen
to twenty five highest visibility scores go to Democrats eighteen

(02:28):
and the twenty five lowest visibility scores go to Republicans
on the s inside.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Okay, so it's not something simple, right that the Democrats
are just have more of a following on X or
or are posting better content on X than Republicans are.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Is nothing that simple, right, Well, that's an excellent question.
You know, we actually look at four different measurements and
this is what goes into what you know, X kind
of calls the tweet credit score. It's diversity of followers,
purported reliability, follower retention, and account tipicity. And we actually
got this idea from an account called the one Parsile.

(03:04):
It's feeding the X code into GROC and asking how
X actually parses out this information and provides a score
for visibility on the website. And so we believe that
it's this purported reliability and account toxicity score that is
interesting here because you can see some prominent Democrats on

(03:26):
both the House and the Senate who have said some
pretty wacky things that are still being promoted at a
higher cliff than Republicans. Prime example, Rep. Alexandria at Conzia
Cortes repeatedly spewing nonsense about election integrity bills, somehow suggesting
that women in America that are married aren't going to
be able to vote. That has nothing to do with
the election Integrity bill. It has to do with the

(03:50):
Save Act. It actually has to do with preventing illegal
immigrants from being on the voter rolls.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, okay, well, obviously x has some more work to do.
Thank you for bringing it to our attention, though, Michael,
appreciate it. That's director of the Media Research Center, Michael
Morris