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Recommender system in X inadvertently profiles ideological positions of users

2026-10-06 12:04:17
Paul Bouchaud, Pedro Ramaciotti
arXiv_AI
         
Abstract

Several data protection laws restrict processing that reveals political opinions, irrespective of the controller's intent. Whether recommender systems do so as a by-product of optimizing relevance has not been measured. From 2.5 million ``Who to Follow'' recommendations shown to 682 volunteers in France, we reconstructed an approximation of the embedding used by X's recommender for 26,509 accounts, computing survey-calibrated ideology scores. One direction in this embedding orders users by Left-Right position (Pearson rho = 0.887), distinct from directions tracking age, gender or popularity. We show this scale exists and affects the recommendations computed from the embedding. Removing it diversified recommendations at a limited cost in accuracy. We document a consequential form of emergent political representation that current definitions of profiling do not clearly address.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02624

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.02624.pdf

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