They were also shown content related to Alternative Germany when they searched for other parties.
TikTok helped promote a far-right political party in Germany among young voters ahead of last month’s EU election, even when they searched for other political parties or politicians on the app, a report has found. from a new report, written by researchers from the nonprofit organization AI Forensics and Interface, a European IT think tank. The researchers found that in the weeks leading up to the vote on June 5, young German users searched for specific political parties and their politicians in the application and received suggestions for other parties in a quarter of the cases. In the majority of cases, they saw videos related to Germany’s leading far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
It’s already well-documented that the AfD has successfully used TikTok to spread extremism and disinformation among younger audiences, but new research suggests that the far-right group – which a German court described as “extremist” earlier this year – is being manipulated by TikTok’s algorithm also helped. TikTok received a copy of the final report before publication and did not dispute the research findings, but said it had removed search recommendations from some AfD-affiliated accounts in the past due to content violations. “In a normal search AfD will come up more often, because AfD is much more present on TikTok, but there is also an algorithm in the search suggestions where someone makes the decision to connect these two searches,” said Martin Degeling, who monitors AI-based recommendation systems at Interface. “If you search for the Green Party, the AfD comes up, if you search for the CDU, the AfD comes up, but if you search for the AfD, no other party comes up”.
According to the researchers, there is no active cooperation between TikTok and far-right parties like the AfD, but the structure of the platform gives bad actors an opportunity to push themselves to the fore. “TikTok’s built-in features, such as ‘Others searched for this’ suggestions, provide a poorly moderated space where the far right, especially the AfD, can take advantage,” said AI Forensics researcher Miazia Schüler. TikTok does not give equal visibility to all parties,” says Salvatore Romano, head of research at AI Forensics, adding that further research by the group in France, Poland, Italy and other EU countries found that “similar problematic content was shown in each country “.
TikTok says it introduced country-specific tools to combat the spread of misinformation during the EU elections. “We protect the integrity of our platform by proactively enforcing strong policies against election disinformation and hate speech, and by connecting people with reliable information. Our polling centers were visited by more than 7.5 million people before the EU elections,” said Ariane de Selliers, TikTok spokesperson.
The researchers also found that in one-third of searches, users received conspiratorial and clickbait-style search suggestions that had little to do with the search terms. When searching for content related to Germany’s Green Party, TikTok’s suggestions included “Habeck’s wife leaves,” referring to Green Party leader and German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck. The suggestion was made despite the fact that there is no truth to the claim and there are no related videos on TikTok. “The proposal is based on the dissemination of false information for the sake of a seemingly newsworthy front page with hardly any political implications,” the researchers wrote in the report.
Other examples include supporting random clickbait-style search suggestions such as “bisexual princess” when searching for the Social Democratic Party, or fear-mongering suggestions such as “Putin’s last warning” when searching for the Greens. Research shows that even if users don’t click on the search suggestions in the app, just seeing the suggestions is enough to stick the terms in people’s minds, and the more extreme the suggestions, the more likely they are to be remembered.
In research last year by Interface and AI Forensics, the group found that users who were presented with a series of search suggestions were more likely to select the most suggestive headline available. In one case, the headline “Olaf Scholz caught in a club” – which was not related to any actual event and had no accompanying video on TikTok – also became the fake headline most people remembered. “People remember these gossip or click titles that they keep in the system without any video or content to back them up,” Degeling said. “We see this as evidence that search suggestions, just by themselves, regardless of video related to them, they really stick in people’s minds.”
According to research by Interface and AI Forensics, 67 percent of 18-25-year-old TikTok users in Germany have frequently used the app’s search function, which is in line with Adobe’s research published this year, which found that 40 percent of Americans now use TikTok as a search engine, and Z- some of the younger generations rely on it more than Google. Search on TikTok is becoming more and more important, search suggestions appear in several places, but for the study, the researchers scrutinized the results of the “Other wanted” option. This is a group of eight different search terms that appear below the initial results on the search page and at first glance appear to be related to the search term you are currently using.
According to TikTok, there are many factors that contribute to a search term being recommended, including comments and common searches after watching videos that decide which keywords are recommended. The researchers found that TikTok has taken some steps to limit the spread of inaccurate or inflammatory search results for certain parties or politicians, but moderation efforts have been inconsistent across the platform.
The researchers also said their results show that TikTok is using a “blocklist” because one in three of the search terms returned nothing in the “Other search” field. These expressions spanned the political spectrum from the AfD to the left-wing Free Democratic Party and the Greens. TikTok said it was an “inaccurate assumption” that TikTok uses a blocklist, but did not respond to a further question about how it chooses which search terms return empty results. “If there is a moderation policy, it is not consistent,” Romano said.
Source: sg.hu
