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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.
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