1d ago

Study of TikTok, X 'For You' feeds in Germany finds far-right political bias ahead of federal elections | TechCrunch

techcrunch.com Study of TikTok, X 'For You' feeds in Germany finds far-right political bias ahead of federal elections | TechCrunch

Recommendation algorithms operated by social media giants TikTok and X have shown evidence of substantial far-right political bias in Germany ahead of a

Recommendation algorithms operated by social media giants TikTok and X have shown evidence of substantial far-right political bias in Germany ahead of a federal election that takes place Sunday, according to new research carried out by Global Witness.

The non-government organization (NGO) undertook an analysis of social media content displayed to new users via algorithmically sorted “For You” feeds — finding both platforms skewed heavily toward amplifying content that favors the far-right AfD party in algorithmically programmed feeds.

Global Witness’ tests identified the most extreme bias on TikTok, where 78% of the political content that was algorithmically recommended to its test accounts, and came from accounts the test users did not follow, was supportive of the AfD party. (It notes this figure far exceeds the level of support the party is achieving in current polling, where it attracts backing from around 20% of German voters.)

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1d ago

Study of TikTok, X ‘For You’ feeds in Germany finds far-right political bias ahead of federal elections

techcrunch.com /2025/02/19/study-of-tiktok-x-for-you-feeds-in-germany-finds-far-right-political-bias-ahead-of-federal-elections/

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117 comments

I'm getting stuff on Facebook, too. I've stopped engaging with political content on Facebook years ago, and every time I see something, I either block the account or click "Stop showing me posts from X".
It doesn't even look like ads. It's just stuff that Facebook seems to happen to be recommending to me.

Coincidentally, I just read a mastodon post where someone did a basic experiment to see what kind of content TikTok is pushing.
I was curious what a TikTok user might see if they made a fresh account. I provided no preferred content categories, and did not interact with any video in any way except the skip them.
In my first fifteen minutes, I received:
9 manosphere “inspiration” videos The official accounts of Tucker Carlson and Vivek 2 clips from each Fox News, and tabloids New York Post and Metro 1 “America first” rando 1 Copaganda vid of “cool” new police robots Elon’s nazi salute without context or commentary
(they go on to list other things they saw after this.)

Pepperidge Farms remembers when Conservatives complained about tech have a left leaning bias.
Was that a confession like all accusations?

Add YouTube to that. You go there without cookies and login, and after you watched some random (not even German) vids to get a home feed, you can be sure to find the AfD in there, just because your language is set to German.
- Even if your content does not lean right wing (true crime/cults/court trials/lawyers, dog videos, craft videos, art videos, protest support music) on YouTube. Occasionally I’ll get a bunch of right wing bullshit all over…. And I’m like??? Then I have to block all of them and eventually they disappear only to resurface again sometime later.

Só musk is getting ready to buy germany
- seems like a modest purchase after the US
- Well at least there will be a bidding war with China!
  I want to put the /s sarcasm mark, but I'm not sure if it's really sarcasm. More sad, sardonic humor but based on some potential truth.

We need to constaly audit algorithmic timelines. There cannot be "trade secrets" here.
It's not like code auditing is some magic were not capable of - its a multi billion industry perfectly capable of managing this task and we have all of the existing tools and frameworks for it.

reddit is doing this too, at first it leaned left but recently they allowed more astroturfing from right wingers to swamp the subs, so now they are banning any remotely things that can be critical of right wing views. the reason it leans more right is, because they are allowing so much trump based news like with MSM.
- It's not particularly surprising when left wingers are first movers to other platforms. The remaining people are a demographic where the left has filtered out, and with content being a product of the user base it gets a similar bias.
- That's why I'm here. Reddit stopped being interesting and became just political.
  
  And anything relating to gaza the comments are truly disgusting and disconnected from reality. Honestly all Reddit has become a battle ground of 80% hate and 10% people trying their best to fight back with another 10 not caring (in terms of commenters)

All feeds on all platforms are skewed right if not even extreme right since years.
You have to block (far) right channels on YouTube to not get their crap videos suggested again and again.
Add to that the brain frying effect of short clip after short clip on IG, YT and TikTok you get those right wing zombies.
We should really ban all of these platforms in the EU - including Xitter, FB. Allow only fully open space products hosted in Europe.
- Unfettered platforms will be overrun in no time. Hate and bigotry are incredibly easy to create and sell.
  
  Unfettered platforms such as Lemmy?

I think it's time we start to acknowledge social media as a threat. They are using our freedom and liberties against us. I really dont know what the answer is here. Shuting down all social media? Doxxing every user so we know we are not dealing with bots? Restricting who gets to publish news? Every move here will take us closer to another dystopia.
I kind of prefer at least to have a saying on what kind of dystopia I want to live in, before the Chinese, Putin or israel choose it for us.
This is just sad. I miss the days in which we thought that internet was a weapon of the masses and not another tool to control us.
- Perhaps dismantling the social media oligarchy by ensuring that companies cannot expand to sizes where they can influence policies? I'm open to ideas. Social media has become a huge psyop tool.
  
  Limiting it's size sounds like a really good approach imo. Something as simple as a user cap or having to be "accepted manually" like in Lemmy would help to contain the attacks i'm thinking of. They can always still infiltrate, and do their shit, but doing so in thousands of different plataforms would be both impractical and expensive.
  
  We just need fediverse awareness, I think the assumption is that these platforms cant be replaced or recreated, like ppl assume even the look is something that cant be remade elsewhere, or would cost a ton. People also need to give what the masses want if thats what they want, apparently mastodon avoided quote tweets forever because of bullying, I can not see myself using a microblogging platform without quoting, its probably the most importatn feature.

This sounds a lot like the concerns that were brought against TikTok after the Romanian elections were annulled in December.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-opens-investigation-into-tiktok-over-romanian-election/
X doing it is probably not going to surprise anyone.

Legalation banning algorithmic feeds and replacing them with chronological posts from users you subscribe to is imperative to fixing our politics and improving the mental health of young people.
- I would definitely not want chronological order. I think people tend to forget how shit those are and how much low quality content there is, especially the bigger communities get. Try it right now on Lemmy or Reddit. I find the Active and Hot sorting on Lemmy pretty good, and those are not designed as algorithmical heroine.
  
  Sure! We can do chronological, most liked, most disliked, most comments. Solid metrics though, nothing that the social media companies can obscure
- Chronological is an algorithm too bruh. There's nothing inherently wrong with algorithms, they're just a tool. Modern social media tends to use them for engagement and advertiser$$, which is harmful.
  
  Simple sorts are fundamentally different than the algorithms people are talking about.
  
  Yeah, the extreme view about algorithms that's prevalent in the Fediverse feels a bit like someone finding a Nazi pamphlet on the ground and deciding that the problem is paper.
- If you were to relate this to tiktok, how would you ever find people to follow?
  
  The same way we used to? Tags and the ability to search for things, along with word of mouth from your friends and media you follow.
  Even before the internet, people found new things like music or books by interacting with those communities, looking in places where those things can be found and finding stuff they like.
  We don't need some algorithm to spoon feed us things it wants us to like, we can find it ourselves with minimal effort.
  
  Making a video sharing app which isn't based as much around a single algorithmic feed?
- What if I want to install my own algorithm on a Pixelfed feed? What if developers make a variety of competing, open source algorithms? Y'all gonna ban all those "algorithms" too? Be careful of calling for state violence to impose your vague opinions.
  
  God i love the tag feature on boost for lemmy

There's a German game called Wolf. Where two people are the wolf and the rest are the villagers. Each turn the two wolves open their eyes and pick a villager to kill, while the villagers keep their eyes shut. Then everyone guesses who the wolves are. If both wolves are caught, the game is over. Almost always, the wolves win.
Moral of the story, an informed minority will almost always defeat an uninformed majority.
I hope it doesn't come to this in Germany..
- Fascinating game. You get to learn what amazing liars people can be. The devil really is a squirrel.
- This game is either “mafia” or “werewolves” in Poland. Really fun to play but it sucks how much real life mirrors it…
- Oh, we played wolf with my german grandmother in Argentina. I never knew it was a german folk game. Thank you for sharing this.
- There's a card game version of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Werewolves_of_Millers_Hollow
- Interesting, in the USA we call that game “warewolf”.
  
  I live in the US, we've always called it "mafia". It probably has a million names. Among Us is based on the same game
  
  In Germany, we also call this game 'werewolf'. Never heard of 'wolf' alone, except for the animal.

I literally clicked on a Twitter link accidentally after months of not visiting it, immediately got far-right propaganda. Obviously.
- It's blatantly obvious what they are doing. I have a 10 year old company Twitter account I don't use anymore, and at some point they put suggested tweets in my notifications, which would usually be related to my industry because of the accounts I follow. Now it's a constant barrage of Elon and Andrew Tate tweets... In my notifications... It's being forced down my throat, and I haven't engaged or even seen their content at any point in time.

Yeah well TikTok was "saved" by Trump and a right winger has a 14% share. I've definitely seen more questionable comments and videos since it got "saved".
- TikTok is also run by the CCP who absolutely do want western nations to be ruled by people like Trump. The more turmoil the better, in their eyes.
  
  "Turmoil" is an interesting choice of words.
  
  I think it was Napoleon who said "Never distract your opponent while he's making mistakes"

Sigh, the algorithms are controlled by likes, it has no idea the content is alt right. But they are nazis though so they obviously would want to and aren't stopping it
- You don't know that, like at all. They say that it is, but there is absolutely no reason to belive them, musks and zukerbergs are lying pieces of shit.
  
  Let's pretend that if you want. I know they are lying. But in perfectly "legal" ways
- What's stopping the likes being boosted by bots? And who's to say who's controlling the bots. Elon's Musks profile it has been suggested is mostly followed by bots. Now maybe that's a third party or maybe it's Elon himself doing that. More than one way to knowingly manipulate a algorithm artificially.
  
  What do they need bots for? Just cut out the middleman and buy and sell upvotes/ recommendations/ rankings on the frontpage. Who would notice?
  Lemmings and even more so Redditors are still clinging to the sham of "objective" platforms playing by some sort of physical rules and clean, unbiased algorithms in the face of multiple daily threads on social media that are very obviously being brigaded and capsized, for much more than 10 years at this point.
  
  Yes? Should I go into detail on why it works the way it does for more whine? No. I tried to educate and you refused it just like a child.

Even all the way back in 2021, an internal study by Twitter — as X used to be called before Elon Musk bought and rebranded the platform — found that its algorithms promote more right-leaning content than left.
(Except from article cited in above paragraph):
Twitter’s research said that Germany was the only country that didn’t experience the right-leaning algorithm bias. It could be related to Germany’s agreement with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to remove hate speech within 24 hours.
Huh. Sounds like things got really bad quickly for German Twits. Did the hate speech policy get rescinded when Musk took over? Also, I wonder if TikTok got worse after whatever deal they made to keep operating in the US - anecdotally I've heard US feeds have been pushing more alt-right content since then.
- yea, before tiktok wash pushing alot of anti-israeli content, or bias, of course usa is very uncomfortable for the war effort, and helping turmp win. and it wasnt only pushing right leaning but left leaning that could contradic tit.
- It’s a final push for he final solution. Almost a putsch.
- They didn't have to make any deals, they just ignored the law and the FCC got gutted by the fascists that China supported during the election.

What about IG? Every single sponsored post is some kind of grift: zionism, religion, prosperity gospel, scientology. It's nonstop right-wing garbage.
- Don’t forget all the ads for weapons and drugs!
  
  That's crazy. What happened to photoshopped instragram "models" and protein powder influencers? Is everything really just propaganda now??

But Tankies and China are the socialist left. /SARCASM

techcrunch . . . I know you're not new, and I know it's difficult being any sort of news platform whatsoever but. Honestly.
Does anyone need this gently presented as if it's any sort of revelation? You know what's going on here. We know what's going on here. Why present this this way?
This is like "Survey of local residents indicates many Jews may not have been seen for weeks"
- Sadly, demonstrably, a lot of people are unaware of anything involving government.

What if people really want to see that stuff, though?
We're doing more harm than good when we try to control what people think instead of including them in the discussion.
- Anybody voting for anti-tax racist fascists is voting against their own interests, including anti-tax racist fascists themselves.
  
  It's fine if you think that, but you're opening yourself up to controlling aspects of people's lives you have no business controlling. You're essentially taking on the role of their parent.
  People would say similar things to "justify" the war on drugs. "Drug users are hurting themselves, so we're doing a good thing by keeping them illegal!"
- My counterpoint to that would be that social media is a psychological drug with negative effects and if people want to be informed, they should go to a library and read.
  
  We have the greatest library in the history of mankind right at our fingertips.
  Part of being informed is, you know, discussing information.
- Kids want to run across the road without looking and stick a knife in a power socket.

What is the purpose of Tiktok to push far-right propaganda? Would it be possible that it all comes from far-right producing far more content?
- The purpose is to destabilize.
  
  Never blame on a conspiracy what is better explained by capitalism.
- I think it's a mix of these algorithms favouring things that get you to spend a lot of time on their apps and those things happen to be things like conspiracies, emotional appeals, and get rich quick schemes.
  Think of a person that spends an unhealthy amount of time on social media. That's their ideal user and they are constantly trying to funnel their users down paths that lead them into becoming that person.
  
  That seems to be the most logical explanation, indeed.
- Probably that the rise of fascism weekend the west.
  
  At this point, there is no more "The West."
  "The Wild West," maybe.

117 comments