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.)
It’s time to get rid of US social media in europe. I don’t care if I won’t be able to engage on social media, we’ll have european social media at some point getting users. But we can’t let the US have such a large impact into our own society, how we vote, etc.
Fuck Elon. Hope he’ll burn in hell.
Europe could… come to the Fediverse!
And help host/contribute to it.
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.)
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.
I have not found a way to block them as a not-logged-in viewer.
Pepperidge Farms remembers when Conservatives complained about tech have a left leaning bias.
Was that a confession like all accusations?
So, and I’m not at all arguing for them here let me be clear, but things like Reddit being dragged in the media for that jailbait subreddit and the Covid stuff causing lawmakers to basically say “hey if you keep allowing disinformation we are going to have to regulate it” is what they mean by leftist bias.
I was reading yarvins bs the other day and that basically sums up the thinking.
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.
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?
Absolutely. We’re far from relevant so the bot / bad actor influx is probably negligible. Defederation won’t protect anyone, they’ll just use the major few instances and get access to 90% of feeds. Afaik points and account age don’t matter, so bans don’t matter. At this point, Lemmy has no defenses.
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)
You forgot bots. Good % of every comments are bots on LLM algos.
gaza/israel related ones are from israeli bots, while everything else almost always come from russia. other users and me pointed out in the past reddit does very little to stem the amount of bots coming from RU.
Good point, I do forget about the bots. Sometimes I hope it’s mostly all bots, but not so sure.
its also the place where people get banned very easily, so i had to avoid those subs to avoid getting banned myself.
Yup, lost my decade + old account, but it is what it is, another app to get off of
i avoid the sub if i get prior banned, either temporarily or a perma one if already have another account. whats different is they decided to after all the accs this time, i know they can connect through your IP or device, but they dint do it before.
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.
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.
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.
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
I call it Secret Hitler.
In Germany, we also call this game ‘werewolf’. Never heard of ‘wolf’ alone, except for the animal.
Das ist so :) I just shortened it, because I wasn’t sure english speakers would know the word
Yes, this is interesting! ‘Wer’ (meaning ‘man’) came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became ‘were’ in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf (‘man wolf’) in modern English.
That’s wild actually, love learning the history behind words. Did you know that very fun fact from the top of your head?
Then I got one for you!
Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from
No, not off the top of my head. But English is roughly half French/Latin and half German, with some Norse and other influences thrown in. Wer or were sound Germanic, so then a little Wikipedia help filled in the details.
There’s a card game version of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Werewolves_of_Millers_Hollow
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”
Well China didn’t heed that advice because they 1000% promote Trump and right wing fascists.
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.
It’s a final push for he final solution. Almost a putsch.
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.
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.
