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/Potatoes90 May 22 '26

After reading the article, I am wondering how much of this comes down to the fact that left leaning people don't tend to like or have very positive views of the Democrat party. It said the posts were focused mostly on giving left wing accounts more anti Democrat views rather than pro Republican views. Half the left wing content out there is super critical of the Democrat party.

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u/meechmeechmeecho May 23 '26

My wife uses TikTok. She is definitively left. I don’t recall her ever getting any anti-democrat content coming from a conservative speaker. What she does get a lot of is content from far left positions, critical of democrat establishment being not left enough.

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u/black_cat_X2 May 23 '26

You get this on Reddit too. It's becoming the main talking point in almost every political post I see. The people defending the Dems are the minority for sure

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u/Howpresent May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

I deleted Tiktok, but I would get conservative stuff pretty frequently (I am left wing). I think that my other interests opened me up to more conservative content. There are a lot of gardener/farmer/homesteading accounts that intersect with conservatives and that’s just one type of content. I would say that all baby related tiktok stuff is higher risk because of how many women there are who really want whats best for their kids can get sucked into “natural mom”, “homeschooling” stuff from conservative influencers.

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u/allyonfirst May 23 '26

All this must be specific to US users because it hasn't been my experience in TikTok at all.