Parties on the political fringes garnered significantly more attention on social media than their centrist rivals in Germany’s parliamentary election in February, a study revealed on Monday.
The report, carried out by the University of Potsdam and the Bertelsmann Foundation, criticized opaque algorithms on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube.
Researchers created 268 fake user profiles of 21- to 25-year-olds on the four platforms, to examine how many videos published by official party accounts appeared in users’ social media feeds.
According to the study, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) posted the most videos – 24.1% – but only received 14.1% of the share of the imaginary users’ feeds.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc – made up of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union (CSU) – also suffered, posting 17.1% of videos but appearing only 4.9% of the time in feeds.
In contrast, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was featured in 37.4% of videos shown to the imaginary users, despite posting only 21.5% of them.
The Left, meanwhile, appeared in 27.6% of videos, even though the socialist party only posted 9.7% of them.
The researchers analysed posts on the feeds between January 1 and February 23, the day of the election to the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament.
Merz’s CDU/CSU bloc came top on 28.5% and eventually formed a coalition with the SPD, which fell to third place on 16.4%.
The AfD finished second with a historic 20.8% of the vote, while The Left impressed with 8.8%.
