Study of TikTok, X 'For You' feeds in Germany finds far-right political bias ahead of federal elections | TechCrunch
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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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I literally clicked on a Twitter link accidentally after months of not visiting it, immediately got far-right propaganda. Obviously.
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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?
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Probably that the rise of fascism weekend the west.
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The purpose is to destabilize.
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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 Did the hate speech policy get rescinded when Musk took over?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.
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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"
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It’s a final push for he final solution. Almost a putsch.
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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.
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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.
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That seems to be the most logical explanation, indeed.
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What about IG? Every single sponsored post is some kind of grift: zionism, religion, prosperity gospel, scientology. It's nonstop right-wing garbage.
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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.
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Never blame on a conspiracy what is better explained by capitalism.
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If you were to relate this to tiktok, how would you ever find people to follow?
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Making a video sharing app which isn't based as much around a single algorithmic feed?
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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.
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IDK I really liked StumbleUpon even before all this stuff was invented... Sometimes you don't know what you like or what to find things that would normally be outside of your bubble.
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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..
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StumbleUpon started out being completely random, so it wasn't driven by mining your cookies and feeding the data into an algorithm. I don't know if it eventually became a nefarious advertising front, but I recall it being pretty innocent. Anyway, I really enjoyed that website before link aggregators rose to such dominance.
