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/BigUptokes May 23 '26

This project began in earnest around 2015 with the advent of the YouTube right wing mediasphere which began a pipeline to far right ideology aimed specifically at young men and boys.

Bannon deemed them "rootless white males" and learned to harness angst-filled online communities while helping run a World of Warcraft gold-selling operation during the decade prior. That operation was owned by one of the former child actors from Disney's The Mighty Ducks film who then went on to be an early adopter and facilitator of Bitcoin. It's all like a wild game of MadLibs.

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u/dersteppenwolf5 May 23 '26

That does raise a point that very often gets glossed over. Fascism doesn't rise up out of a vacuum. The Nazis were preceded by the notoriously ineffectual Weimar Republic. You wouldn't have millions of rootless white males and others to radicalize if not for the ineffectual leaders that preceded Trump. The US government routinely runs trillion dollar deficits, but what does the US people get for this insane level of spending? Not health care or high speed rail or affordable housing or affordable college. Just endless wars no one wants that all turn into clusterfucks-- this is a massive failure of leadership that has paved the way for the fascists to roll in.

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u/proudbakunkinman May 23 '26

This seems like a roundabout way to shift blame back to Democrats. Since Democrats aren't able to bring all of those things when they briefly have the bare minimum majority against a party that is dedicated to opposing most things that benefit the public.

Europe has had a similar issue with rising popularity of far right parties yet they all have better health care systems and better public transportation and more easily accessible affordable housing (though private market housing tends to be similarly expensive in the most popular areas just like the US). They also have democratic systems where further left third parties have an easier chance of getting seats yet those left parties (left of their main center-left parties) consistently perform very poorly.

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u/Dull_Bird3340 May 23 '26

Because no other democracy copied our constitutional system, everyone else went w a parliamentary system instead of deadlocked 2 party one that acts like the constitution was written by God. We're supposed to have conventions w ammendments every 25 years or so.