New York (CNN Business)Imagine opening up the Twitter app on your phone and scrolling through your feed. Suddenly, you come across a hyper-partisan tweet calling Hillary Clinton the "godmother of ISIS." It's from a user you do not follow, and it's not in your feed by virtue of a retweet from a user you do follow. So how did it get there?

Over the last several months, Twitter has begun inserting what it believes to be relevant and popular tweets into the feeds of people who do not subscribe to the accounts that posted them. In other words, Twitter has started showing users tweets from accounts that are followed by those they follow. This practice is different from the promoted content paid for by advertisers, as Twitter is putting these posts into the feeds of users without being paid and without consent from users.

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In the case of this reporter, who follows accounts on both the right and left, Twitter has displayed tweets from individuals on both sides of the political spectrum. On the right, users displayed to this reporter included Republicans like Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan and Ronna McDaniel. On the left, users displayed to this reporter included Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Beto O'Rourke, television pundit Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Murphy and author Stephen King.

However, the feature also surfaced tweets from individuals further to the fringes of American politics — personalities who regularly fill their Twitter feeds with personal attacks, inflammatory political rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Such users displayed to this reporter included: James Woods, the actor with a history of incendiary political rhetoric who promotes conspiratorial views; Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host who was recently suspended by the network for Islamophobic comments; Candace Owens, the Turning Point USA communications director who had to clarify controversial comments about Adolf Hitler; Bill Mitchell, the Twitter personality who peddles conspiracy theories and inflammatory political rhetoric; Jack Posobiec, the One America News Network host who has a history peddling conspiracy theories; "Diamond and Silk," the pro-Trump social media duo who employ inflammatory political rhetoric and pushed false claims about Facebook; and others.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/22/tech/twitter-algorithm-political-rhetoric/index.html