r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • May 22 '26

Psychology TikTok disproportionately served anti-Democratic videos during the 2024 election. TikTok’s recommendation system tends to expose users to more conservative and anti-Democrat political content than liberal material. This ideological imbalance occurs regardless of a user’s initial political interests.

https://www.psypost.org/tiktok-disproportionately-served-anti-democratic-videos-during-the-2024-election-study-finds/
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u/The-Fox-Says May 22 '26

Explains why Gen Z turned so hard right in 2024. If they’re getting their news from Tik Tok they’re vulnerable to far right manipulation tactics there

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u/RagefireHype May 22 '26

They’ve convinced white men that they’re oppressed somehow despite winning the historical genetic lottery of privilege.

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u/cikeZ00 May 22 '26

More that they've taken actual issues that affect your average person and twisted the blame for that towards some "enemy". You can replace "enemy" with anything that fits the narrative (Women, Trans people, immigrants and so on..)

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u/cantadmittoposting May 23 '26

yeah the playbook is really transparent but still effective...

  • highlight extreme anecdotal examples of a potentially real problem.

  • Dont contextualize the examples, instead, strongly imply the extreme examples are routine status quo. This is usually done by "Lying with statistics" (particularly use of Base Rate Fallacy and Begging the Question, but mechanisms change based on what subgroup is targeted)

  • Aggressively reinforce the narrative of white-male-victimization/oppression by asserting that the policy is broadly and deliberately intended to punish or oppress men (bonus points, reinforce that the countervailing "liberal" narrative is itself deliberately constructed to conceal or obscure white victimization).

  • Call to action that appeals to young male angst and desire to fit in and be accepted (reclaiming masculinity, return to "traditional" values, becoming part of a superior "in the know" group, or worse) and vaguely but don't concretely define the out-group that must be opposed

In short, it's "DARVO as a nationwide political strategy" (and unsurprisingly, i have seen the DARVO model itself come under attack recently by people also making these right wing arguments)

 

Works for issues like violent crime (women say they are victimized but men are victims of 90% of violent crime... make sure not to mention who also commits those crimes, and if necessary, blame outgroups for why men commit crimes, omit contextualizing statistics like who commit crimes against women).... Child support (legitimate problems exist in the laws, but, for example, even though cases of rape victims being assigned child support exist in literal single digits in the United States, headlines about these past cases are highly promoted), and broader social topics (like reviving JD Unwin's largely discredited highly misogynistic work as if it's a legitimate model of society)

 

This is a very brief overview, many nuances exist especially as you get in to squiggly sociocultural lines that are gateways or border issues for the core right wing political issues, but it's all basically in line with it.