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TikTok helped promote Germany’s far-right extremist political party to young voters ahead of last month’s EU elections, even when they were searching the app for other political parties or politicians, according to a new report shared exclusively with WIRED.
The report was written by researchers from the nonprofit organization AI Forensics and Interface, a European think tank specializing in information technology. Researchers found that in a quarter of cases, young users in Germany searching on the app for specific political parties and their politicians in the weeks leading up to the vote on June 5 were instead given suggestions for other parties. In the majority of these cases, they were given suggestions linked to Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s leading far-right party.
It is already well documented that the AfD has successfully leveraged TikTok to spread extremism and disinformation to a younger audience, but the new research suggests that the far-right group, which was labeled “extremist” by a German court earlier this year, was aided by the TikTok algorithm itself.
TikTok, which was provided with a copy of the final report ahead of publication, didn’t dispute the research findings but said that it has, in the past, made some accounts linked to the AfD ineligible for search recommendations as a result of content violations.
“For the regular search, you will see AfD popping up more often, because the AfD is more present on TikTok, but for the search suggestions there’s also this algorithmic aspect where someone makes the decision to relate these two searches,” Martin Degeling, who tracks AI-based recommendation systems at Interface, tells WIRED. “You search for the Green Party, and the AfD pops up, you search for the CDU and the AfD pops up, [but] you search for AfD, no other party pops up.”
The researchers say that their findings prove no active collaboration between TikTok and far-right parties like the AfD but that the platform’s structure gives bad actors an opportunity to flourish. “TikTok’s built-in features such as the ‘Others Searched For’ suggestions provides a poorly moderated space where the far-right, especially the AfD, is able to take advantage,” Miazia Schüler, a researcher with AI Forensics, tells WIRED.
“During elections, TikTok is not giving equal visibility to all the parties, and it’s basically incentivized to create suggestions that are not based on the content inside the app,” says Salvatore Romano, head of research at AI Forensics, adding that further research the group has conducted in France, Poland, Italy, and other EU countries found that “similarly problematic content was being shown across countries.”
TikTok says that it had put in place country-specific tools to combat the spread of misinformation during the EU elections.