Political Biases on X before the 2025 German Federal Election

2025/02/17 by Tabia Tanzin Prama, Tabia, Tanzin Prama, Chhandak Bagchi +8 · 6 voices · 1 citation
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Audit #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #Content (measure theory) #Federal election #German #Media Influence and Politics #Politics #Social Media and Politics #cs.CY #cs.SI

paper · pdf · doi:10.5281/zenodo.14880275

published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)

openalex publication_date 2025/02/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

This study examines whether German X users would see politically balanced news feeds if they followed comparable leading politicians from each federal parliamentary party of Germany. We address this question using an algorithmic audit tool and all publicly available posts published by 436 German politicians on X. We find that the default feed of X showed more content from far-right AfD than from other political parties. We analyze potential factors influencing feed content and the resulting political non-representativeness of X. Our findings suggest that engagement measures and unknown factors related to party affiliation contribute to the overrepresentation of extremes of the German political party spectrum in the default algorithmic feed of X.

Citations

• Reranking Social Media Feeds: A Practical Guide for Field Experiments
• The spread of true and false news online

Cited by

• Simple changes to content curation algorithms affect the beliefs people form in a collaborative filtering experiment

Discussions

• arxiv.org/abs/2503.02888 [bsky, 70 points, 1 comments]
• Here are the take-home messages of our research "Political Biases on X before the 2025 German Federal Election" (link) broadcast yesterday by ZDF. First, we find that the default feed of X showed more [bsky, 36 points, 8 comments]
• If you keep using #Twitter, be aware that the content pushed to your feed is extremely distorted towards right-wing/anti-immigrant ideology. This paper provides clear evidence for that: "Political Bi [bsky, 20 points, 0 comments]
• Auf X entscheidet der rechtsextreme Elon Musk, wer Reichweite bekommt - und surprise: das sind nicht die demokratischen Parteien: arxiv.org/abs/2503.02888 [bsky, 2 points, 2 comments]
• Studie zur politische Ausrichtung auf X vor der Bundestagswahl 2025 arxiv.org/abs/2503.02888 „Diese Ergebnisse zeigen, dass X die Extreme des politischen Spektrums in Deutschland überproportional herv [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
• Political biases on X before the 2025 German Federal Election. Tabia Tanzin Prama, Chhandak Bagchi, Vishal Kalakonnavar, Paul Krauß, Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz. arxiv.org/abs/2503.02888 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

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