"Two independent analyses of social media content in the lead-up to the German federal election in 2025 have shown that extremist parties, in particular the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), were disproportionately favored by X, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. A report prepared by the German nonprofit organization Bertelsmann Stiftung found that on TikTok, for example, 50% of all suggested political content was found to be AfD-related, with the mainstream conservatives a distant second at 15%. The outsized prominence of extremist content cannot be explained by the parties’ actions alone, because they all used very similar social media strategies. Another study, which has been shared by the authors via the pre-publication platform Arxiv, showed that the X algorithm disproportionately amplified content by extreme parties, especially on the extreme right. This selective amplification is particularly concerning in light of earlier research conducted by me and my team, which showed that German politicians from the extreme right and left share far more untrustworthy content on Twitter than politicians of the four mainstream parties.
A recent field experiment investigated the consequences of algorithmic amplification by re-ranking content favored by the X/Twitter algorithm that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity. When antidemocratic content was downranked, participants’ outgroup animosity declined compared to a control group that was exposed to the standard X/Twitter algorithm, both during the study and afterwards. Reduced exposure to antidemocratic content also reduced people’s negative emotions during the study. This is not an isolated finding but adds to existing evidence that social media causally contributes to hate crimes and xenophobia.
The DSA was designed to address such challenges."
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aee9835
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