The Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider believes these ‘shocking’ findings are evidence that there is ‘a radical remnant within X fighting against Elon Musk.’
A recent study shows that the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) disproportionately suppresses conservative media content and elevates left-leaning voices despite owner Elon Musk’s pledge in May to “investigate” this bias.
Media Research Center (MRC) published on Friday the results of a study into how content on X is boosted and suppressed. Remarkably, MRC found that nearly 74 percent of the right-leaning media outlets it reviewed were de-boosted, with considerably lower scores than left-leaning outlets.
By contrast, MRC found that “an overwhelming majority of the left-leaning media outlets” have “highly favorable” visibility scores.
A researcher on X known as “@The1Parzival” determined how each social media account was scored by prompting the Musk-owned AI chatbot Grok with questions that revealed how they were ranked on the “backend” of X. The resulting data, shared with MRC, showed that four metrics shape an account’s “visibility” score: “Mass Appeal” (diversity of followers), “Reputation” (purported reliability), “Toxicity” (potentially offensive content or perceived harmfulness), and “Follower” (follower retention).
Using the ratings firm AllSides’ classification of media outlets by their “perceived” ideological bias on left-to-right scale, MRC found that X gave left-leaning media outlets an average visibility score of 82.64 out of 100, while right-leaning outlets received an average score of 63.56.
This difference has powerful consequences. Grok told MRC that a score of 65 out of 100 on reputation alone, for example, is the “minimum” required for an X account to be recommended on its feed. In addition, generally speaking, the higher an account’s score is, the greater is its reach and viewership on X.
Media outlets classified as right-leaning in MRC’s review included The Washington Times, The Federalist, Fox News, The Daily Wire, Blaze Media and The Daily Caller.
The Grok-acquired data further found that “a staggering 100 percent of left-leaning media outlets are assigned favorable ‘reputation’ scores by X’s employees,” and that these leftist outlets were assigned an average toxicity score of 26.33, compared to an average 47.60 score for right-leaning media outlets (a 21-point difference).
Left-leaning accounts with low toxicity scores included The New York Times (10/100) and MSNBC (20/100), which regularly features extraordinarily divisive content, such as the claim that those who believe rights come from God are “Christian nationalists” (a derogatory term in their usage), and the claim that children do not belong to their parents, but to “whole communities.”
The MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider believes these “shocking” findings are evidence that there is “a radical remnant within X fighting against Elon Musk.” However, it is unclear whether this is the case, given that the study comes two and half months after it was brought to Musk’s attention on X that conservative accounts are being “throttled.”
U.S. Senator for Utah Mike Lee wrote on May 23, 2024, “How long will it take to get rid of the stage-five clingers at X—those who still periodically throttle conservatives?”
Musk replied, “Well, neither conservative [sic] nor progressives should be throttled. The point is to have an even playing field. I will investigate.”
.@elonmusk: how long will it take to get rid of the stage-five clingers at X—those who still periodically throttle conservatives? pic.twitter.com/rZ4SttCh59
The X CEO’s power over his platform’s algorithm is confirmed by February reports from X employees that Musk called an “all hands on deck” meeting to boost his own posts when he found that a Super Bowl tweet from Joe Biden garnered much more reach than his own.
Documents were shared with Business Insidershowing that the “stated goal” of the meeting was to determine “why engagement” with Biden and Musk’s posts were different. The documents included a “snapshot of Twitter’s code that showed Musk’s tweets were being boosted.”
At the time, Platformer reported, “After his Super Bowl tweet did worse numbers than President Biden’s, Twitter’s CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm.”
Musk has repeatedly voiced a commitment to “free speech” and acknowledged the importance of Twitter/X’s adherence to this principle. He wrote on his platform in 2022, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” He followed that up by asking: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?”
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The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.
“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”
But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington Post, STAT News and CNN.
The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.
Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.
Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.
Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.
FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.
The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.
Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.
“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.
Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.
Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.
The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.
Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.
Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.
Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.
The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.
David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shotswith Pfizer and Moderna.
Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.
That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.
The U.S. Department of Justice will not release the entirety of the federal government’s files on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein by the end of day Friday, failing to fully comply with a mandate from Congress.
DOJ will release several hundred thousand documents, however, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Fox News interview. He estimated that “several hundred thousand more” will be released “over the next couple of weeks.”
The delay, Blanche explained, is due to the significant number of redactions that the department must complete in order to protect the identifications of witnesses and victims in the files.
By failing to fully comply with a congressional edict, lawmakers would have grounds to impeach or hold U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress.
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Nov. 18, which President Donald Trump signed into law the next day.
The bill, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., requires that the U.S. Attorney General “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice” that relate to Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Any Justice Department official who does not comply with this law will be subject to prosecution for obstruction of justice,” Khanna vowed.
Epstein died in jail awaiting trial in 2019 and Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.
President Donald Trump, former president Bill Clinton, billionaire businessman Bill Gates, and dozens of other high-profile figures have received intense public scrutiny for their connections with Epstein and Maxwell.
