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.)
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.
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”
Well China didn’t heed that advice because they 1000% promote Trump and right wing fascists.
“Turmoil” is an interesting choice of words.
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.
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.
Só musk is getting ready to buy germany
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.
seems like a modest purchase after the US
But Tankies and China are the socialist left. /SARCASM
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.
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.
techcrunch . . . I know you’re not new, and I know it’s difficult being any sort of news platform whatsoever but. Honestly.
Does anyone need this gently presented as if it’s any sort of revelation? You know what’s going on here. We know what’s going on here. Why present this this way?
This is like “Survey of local residents indicates many Jews may not have been seen for weeks”
Sadly, demonstrably, a lot of people are unaware of anything involving government.
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.
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.
Good point, I do forget about the bots. Sometimes I hope it’s mostly all bots, but not so sure.
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.
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.
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.
Legalation banning algorithmic feeds and replacing them with chronological posts from users you subscribe to is imperative to fixing our politics and improving the mental health of young people.
I would definitely not want chronological order. I think people tend to forget how shit those are and how much low quality content there is, especially the bigger communities get. Try it right now on Lemmy or Reddit. I find the Active and Hot sorting on Lemmy pretty good, and those are not designed as algorithmical heroine.
Sure! We can do chronological, most liked, most disliked, most comments. Solid metrics though, nothing that the social media companies can obscure
Chronological is an algorithm too bruh. There’s nothing inherently wrong with algorithms, they’re just a tool. Modern social media tends to use them for engagement and advertiser$$, which is harmful.
Simple sorts are fundamentally different than the algorithms people are talking about.
Yeah, the extreme view about algorithms that’s prevalent in the Fediverse feels a bit like someone finding a Nazi pamphlet on the ground and deciding that the problem is paper.
or the printer. Great analogy
Are you three even old enough to remember an internet before the algorithms?
It still exists in some places
If you were to relate this to tiktok, how would you ever find people to follow?
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
Making a video sharing app which isn’t based as much around a single algorithmic feed?
What if I want to install my own algorithm on a Pixelfed feed? What if developers make a variety of competing, open source algorithms? Y’all gonna ban all those “algorithms” too? Be careful of calling for state violence to impose your vague opinions.
God i love the tag feature on boost for lemmy
God i love the tag feature on voyager for lemmy
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.)
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
Pretend what? Pretend that you (and also everone else) don’t have an insight into how their algorithms work, besides their words? We need to pretend that?
No, you can pretend I don’t know, and everyone else already do as you can see
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.
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.
Not sure your education is worth much tbh. Happy for you to keep it 😂
No you are crying about it actually but fair enough
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.
Nah. I just have different opinion and more knowledge which for some reason that makes you angry.
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.
