The AfD was twice as effective at reaching first-time voters on the app than all other parties combined, according to an analysis of platform data. This may explain why the party performed so well among young voters.
The AfD, Germany’s far-right party, was disproportionally mentioned in the search suggestions of other parties. We see this as a crucial ill-equilibrated misrepresentation of German parties and what they stand for. The AfD is likely the most active party on TikTok, which is a possible explanation of their overrepresentation. However, the disproportionate leveraging of its visibility within the search suggestion feature clearly perpetuates this imbalance. This is a distinct indication of TikTok prioritizing engagement and virality over quality, messaging, or proportional representation of political parties on their platform.
Germany’s huge TikTok market is vulnerable to extremists’ tactics, which have gained major traction with young voters. Our cross-border investigation proved that you can easily buy virality on social networks.
In Romania, reporters showed that the social network was a key platform for emerging far-right political figures.
Similarly, in Poland, the TikTok champions of the European Parliament elections were the far-right, who are now heading to Brussels.
In Slovakia, TikTok served as a fertile ground for conspiracies about the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, reporters found that the platform’s algorithm was pushing users into a bubble of disinformation.
Estonians were exposed to fear-mongering related to war that was propagated through TikTok.
In Hungary, Russian narratives flow to TikTok via public media.
And these are just two investigations on the topic. There is much more. No politician can say they didn’t know it.
Might also be a because of bots and click farms. Platforms boost content that performs well. If a bot farm floods a post with likes, shares and comments then the platform conts that as positive engagement and will show it to more people.
Sure, the algorithms do their part. But here it doesn’t seem to be only explanation. The first study I posted above says, among others:
Throughout the “Others Searched For” data of party and candidate queries, we surprisingly found that many queries did not return any search suggestions. From 60 query terms, the search suggestions for 21 consistently returned no results, as seen in the Table below. This indicates that the platform intervened to specifically disable the search suggestion for these search terms, e.g., through a blocklist. The No Suggestions label was applied to queries “AfD”, “BSW”, “FDP” and “Christlich-Soziale Union” and various political candidates too. Across party affiliation, the AfD and the CSU seem to have the most no-result queries, closely followed by Die Grüne.
Emphasis mine, but it’s just one example. The whole study makes a good read.
This has long been known.
Auditing TikTok: Other search for … the opposition party (July 2024) ---- [Archived]
How the far-right used TikTok to spread lies and conspiracies in Central Eastern European countries (July 2024) ---- [Archived]
And these are just two investigations on the topic. There is much more. No politician can say they didn’t know it.
Might also be a because of bots and click farms. Platforms boost content that performs well. If a bot farm floods a post with likes, shares and comments then the platform conts that as positive engagement and will show it to more people.
Sure, the algorithms do their part. But here it doesn’t seem to be only explanation. The first study I posted above says, among others:
Emphasis mine, but it’s just one example. The whole study makes a good read.