Lawfare Daily: What’s Influencing Politics Online? X’s Algorithm, Creators, and the New Persuasion Machine
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Lawfare Contributing Editor Renée DiResta speaks with Nathaniel Lubin, co-author of “How Social Media Creators Shape Mass Politics,” and Philine Widmer, co-author of a recent Nature paper, “The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm.” Together, they discuss two different layers of online influence—a platform’s algorithms and the trusted voices inside it—and their implications for mass politics.
The conversation explores what happens when recommendation systems shape what people see, and what happens when creators shape how people interpret it. They discuss whether algorithms move political attitudes by shifting exposure and salience, whether creators are persuasive because audiences trust them, and what these findings suggest about political influence in an environment increasingly organized by feeds, rankings, and parasocial relationships.
Additional reading:
- “Twitter Is Not Real Life,” by Lakshya Jain in The Argument, February 5, 2026
- “X Really Is Pulling Users to the Right,” by John Herrman in Intelligencer, February 21, 2026
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In fact, in our study, we show that if people start using the algorithmic feed on X, as opposed to the chronological feed, they do change their political opinions. |
| 0:15.6 | And they switch their political opinions to the right. |
| 0:19.3 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Renee Duresta, contributing |
| 0:22.4 | editor at Lawfare with Nathaniel Lubin, founder of Insight Studio, Survey 160, and the Better |
| 0:27.5 | Internet Initiative, and Professor Fuline Widmer of the Paris School of Economics. |
| 0:32.6 | There's lots of effects happening all the time everywhere, and your exposure to these platforms |
| 0:36.9 | is sort of a layering effect of lots and lots |
| 0:39.4 | different nudges. |
| 0:40.3 | And any individual nudge might be very small or might even close to zero. |
| 0:43.6 | But, you know, some of them are having effects. |
| 0:46.3 | And in aggregate, they are having big effects. |
| 0:48.4 | And so that point, I think, is the thing that is what's most important. |
| 0:52.5 | Today, we are talking about social media and influence. |
| 0:56.1 | The algorithm or the influencer. |
| 0:58.3 | What's shaping political persuasion? |
| 1:00.9 | One of the things that I really appreciated about your two different papers was that I thought |
| 1:06.6 | that they brought together and highlighted two different aspects of layers of influence online. |
| 1:11.4 | Right. |
| 1:11.7 | So one is the platform itself. |
| 1:13.9 | What happens when the feed changes, when the feed changes what people see? |
| 1:17.6 | So Phileen, yours, I think your paper in nature really focuses on that aspect of it. |
| 1:23.0 | And then Nate, yours, what happens when people follow particular types of creators, |
... |
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