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.)
The same way we used to? Tags and the ability to search for things, along with word of mouth from your friends and media you follow.
Even before the internet, people found new things like music or books by interacting with those communities, looking in places where those things can be found and finding stuff they like.
We don’t need some algorithm to spoon feed us things it wants us to like, we can find it ourselves with minimal effort.
IDK I really liked StumbleUpon even before all this stuff was invented… Sometimes you don’t know what you like or what to find things that would normally be outside of your bubble.
StumbleUpon started out being completely random, so it wasn’t driven by mining your cookies and feeding the data into an algorithm. I don’t know if it eventually became a nefarious advertising front, but I recall it being pretty innocent. Anyway, I really enjoyed that website before link aggregators rose to such dominance.
Reddit killed Stumbleupon for me, that’s how I discovered it to be honest. Before then I’d used Digg but that got killed with new Digg