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.)
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.
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.
Sigh, the algorithms are controlled by likes, it has no idea the content is alt right. But they are nazis though so they obviously would want to and aren’t stopping it
You don’t know that, like at all. They say that it is, but there is absolutely no reason to belive them, musks and zukerbergs are lying pieces of shit.
Let’s pretend that if you want. I know they are lying. But in perfectly “legal” ways
What’s stopping the likes being boosted by bots? And who’s to say who’s controlling the bots. Elon’s Musks profile it has been suggested is mostly followed by bots. Now maybe that’s a third party or maybe it’s Elon himself doing that. More than one way to knowingly manipulate a algorithm artificially.
What do they need bots for? Just cut out the middleman and buy and sell upvotes/ recommendations/ rankings on the frontpage. Who would notice?
Lemmings and even more so Redditors are still clinging to the sham of “objective” platforms playing by some sort of physical rules and clean, unbiased algorithms in the face of multiple daily threads on social media that are very obviously being brigaded and capsized, for much more than 10 years at this point.Yes? Should I go into detail on why it works the way it does for more whine? No. I tried to educate and you refused it just like a child.
His reply was perfectly civil and mature. You’re the one who’s acting childish.
At a guess it’s a Musk fan looking to troll. Sad times that people spend their time like this when having a civil discussion is just as easy and you might actually get a bit more out of it 🤷♀️
No, I refuse to educate someone that doesn’t want to learn and it’s childish to think you deserve it using anger. When you grow up I can tell you
No dude, you’re being a prick.
Not sure your education is worth much tbh. Happy for you to keep it 😂
No you are crying about it actually but fair enough
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
But Tankies and China are the socialist left. /SARCASM
What if people really want to see that stuff, though?
We’re doing more harm than good when we try to control what people think instead of including them in the discussion.
My counterpoint to that would be that social media is a psychological drug with negative effects and if people want to be informed, they should go to a library and read.
We have the greatest library in the history of mankind right at our fingertips.
Part of being informed is, you know, discussing information.
And social media is not a library. Tiktok and X is not a library. It’s a collection of thoughts of humanity and bots controlled by an algorithm where it’s purpose is to manipulate you to consume. The Internet is not a library but it can give you access to libraries. The Internet is also now colonised for the purpose of manipulating people to consume.
Right now, we are not debating. You’re telling me your opinion and I’m telling you mine. You want to be informed? Touch grass. Engage in human communication. Go. To. A. Library.
Got more books right here than any library on earth.
Engage in human communication.
Like it or not, that’s what social media is.
That’s was the original intent of social media but it doesn’t function that way now. It’s also filled with bots and you’ve got no idea if you’re actually talking to a human being. The only way to be sure is to touch grass so you’re actually outside the sphere of influence of misinformation and those that control the algorithm.
Let’s go back to the topic at hand, which is whether or not we should remove fascist content from social media like Tiktok and X. These platforms are not a gateway to that library you linked to and you have to go out of your way, i.e. purposely search for it, to access it. Tiktok and X are full of sound bites that do more harm than good; posts with links to your library, for example, would not get the same exposure as, say, a sound bite promoting fascism. Case in point: the article.
The generation that has grown up with 24/7 access to the Internet have no idea what it feels like to not have information streaming into your brain everywhere you look. When information is fed and available to you 24/7, you can’t learn to tell the difference between what’s bullshit and what’s not because the 24/7 stream is so overwhelming, all you have left is the will to scroll for sound bites. The only way to counter that is to step out of that stream and slow down the incoming information so you can process it and critically analyse it. Our brains can only process a maximum amount of information that is far below what an algorithm can do.
And that library link, what are you reading on there right now? Are you researching talking points against fascism? Are you looking at the history of previous fascist regimes and how they came to be?
you’re actually outside the sphere of influence of misinformation and those that control the algorithm.
You think people you talk to outside of the internet aren’t influenced by social media?
Kids want to run across the road without looking and stick a knife in a power socket.
Anybody voting for anti-tax racist fascists is voting against their own interests, including anti-tax racist fascists themselves.
It’s fine if you think that, but you’re opening yourself up to controlling aspects of people’s lives you have no business controlling. You’re essentially taking on the role of their parent.
People would say similar things to “justify” the war on drugs. “Drug users are hurting themselves, so we’re doing a good thing by keeping them illegal!”
Research and Historic Examples both shows positive outcomes from voting against anti-tax racist fascists. The same is not true for the War on Drugs. What you’re attempting to describe is dogma and closed-mindedness which are present in every single political ideology. What you fail to understand is that identifying those individuals and trying to inform them is not dogmatic, it’s helping them make informed choices.
Also, the proof that far right is overrepresented on social media compared to their share of the population shows that the services are biased, not that this is “what people think.”
the war on drugs in the US, was an invention by nixon as a way to truncate/distract the public from his own problems when he was making scandal after scandal in office. NIXON, REAGAN, ,etc.
Right. And people can always point to “research” that says drugs are bad or “research” that says certain races are smarter than others.
The problem is you’re trying to be some grand arbiter of truth, or deciding or those arbiters are, when historically every argument you’ve made so far has also been used to perpetuate lies.
Drugs are bad, that was never in question
Your assertion, since you’ve forgotten, is that the War on Drugs was bad, which research would agree with
I’m sorry you’re struggling with this. I hope you get well soon.
Drugs are bad, that was never in question
Whew, glad you don’t get to decide what I put in my body.
Your assertion, since you’ve forgotten, is that the War on Drugs was bad, which research would agree with
Yes… and those who support the war on drugs can point to research saying drugs are bad. It’s sad this has to be spelled out for you.
I’m sorry you’re struggling with this. I hope you get well soon.
Ironic, considering you’ve shown us you can’t comprehend what you’re reading.
And if somebody points to research saying drugs are bad as justification for war on drugs, you can point to research that war on drugs is bad. Then they would get confused and start quoting every line of your comment one at a time as if to make it talk slower for them.
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.
I think it was Napoleon who said “Never distract your opponent while he’s making mistakes”
