TikTok’s algorithm favored Republican content in 2024 US elections, study finds

A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature finds that TikTok’s algorithm systematically prioritized pro-Republican content in three states leading up to the 2024 US elections. Researchers created hundreds of dummy accounts and conditioned them to mimic real users’ behavior by watching a set of videos either aligned with the US Democratic or Republican parties. Then, they tracked the videos TikTok recommended on these accounts’ For You pages, TikTok’s main feed. “We found a consistent imbalance,” they wrote in Nature. About 42% of US social media users say that these platforms are important for getting involved with political and social issues , according to Pew Research, but it’s not often clear how recommendation algorithms shape what appears in feeds. Professors Talal Rahwan and Yasir Zaki at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus set out to study how partisan politics shows up on TikTok – a platform that has become a key source of political information , especially for some young adults. Their study notes that this demographic – ages 18 to 29 – shifted by 10 percentage points towards Trump between the 2020 and 2024 elections. TikTok did not offer comment by press time. Bots that were trained on pro-Republican content viewed about 11.5% more content that agreed with their views compared to their pro-Democrat counterparts. That imbalance held for exposure to opposing views, too. …