Because that is a political discussion that will inevitably derail the point.
If there is identified bias then the platform must address it. Or it should be labelled a national security threat.
How could we regulate this? I can think of two ways:
- Results-based enforcement. i.e., companies are free to use whatever recommendation model they like, but have to recommend content within ideological bounds. i.e., you can't bias toward one partisanship more than X%. There's some precedent for this with the equal-time rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule) and FCC fairness doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine).
- Algorithm-based enforcement. i.e., there are limits on the algorithm itself. Perhaps you have to present your algorithm to a government agency and provide a proof that it obeys certain properties. But the enforcement here is analytical rather than empirical.
Can you provide research for each of these.
Otherwise it's just muddying the waters to act like the bias is inherent to all platforms.
Here's a recent study on YouTube from the same author as this TikTok study finding left-leaning bias in US recommendations: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/8/pgad264/72424....
Here's a somewhat older study from Twitter itself where they determined that their recommendations were biased toward right-leaning accounts: https://cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com/content/dam/blog-twitter....
IMO the interesting question is not whether an individual platform is biased and what its biases are, but rather how we might regulate recommendations given that there is always a risk of bias.
If it's orgasmic then this is no different than any other form of organic popularity. Seeing as Trump won the popular vote and the electoral collage, people were interested in republican content. On the same token it's very easy to AstroTurf and claim it was organic. From my personal conversations in meat-space I lean organic.
Is there funny business going on? Absolutely, all the time everywhere in every way. Can we say this was funny business? Not without the code.
TLDR: Popularity algorithms push popular content algorithmically.
Not aware of any major platform that solely uses a popularity algorithm.