A comprehensive study released on Wednesday has revealed that the popular social media app TikTok may have helped tilt the 2024 election in President Donald Trump’s favor, The Guardian reported.
“In an environment where margins are thin, systematic differences in the kind of political information recommended to tens of millions of young voters are worth taking seriously,” said Yasir Zaki, a professor of computer science at New York University’s campus in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), speaking with The Guardian.
Younger voters aged 18 to 29 – TikTok’s primary user base – shifted towards Trump by 10 percentage points when comparing the 2020 and 2024 elections. And, according to a study published by the prestigious scientific journal Nature, TikTok’s algorithm had “systematically prioritized pro-Republican content in three states leading up to the 2024 US elections,” The Guardian reported.
“Our finding isn’t just about reinforcement,” said Talal Rahwan, also a professor at New York University at UAE, as well as one of the authors of the study, speaking with The Guardian.
“Democratic accounts were shown significantly more anti-Democratic content than Republican accounts were shown anti-Republican content. The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”
To conduct the study, researchers created hundreds of TikTok accounts, used virtual private networks to geolocate said accounts to specific cities, and trained said accounts to watch videos aligning with either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican Party content. The dummy accounts trained on pro-GOP content were delivered by TikTok’s algorithm with 11.5% more content aligning with their views when compared to the pro-Democratic Party content.
“Our findings show partisan imbalances in political information exposure on a platform dominated by algorithmic recommendations, with implications for platform governance and democratic discourse,” the peer-reviewed study reads.