Political Biases on X before the 2025 German Federal Election

This study examines whether German X users would see politically balanced news feeds if they followed comparable leading politicians from each federal parliamentary party of Germany. We address this question using an algorithmic audit tool and all publicly available posts published by 436 German politicians on X. We find that the default feed of X showed more content from far-right AfD than from other political parties. We analyze potential factors influencing feed content and the resulting political non-representativeness of X. Our findings suggest that engagement measures and unknown factors related to party affiliation contribute to the overrepresentation of extremes of the German political party spectrum in the default algorithmic feed of X.