The algorithm of social media platform TikTok is recommending twice the amount of far-right and nationalist right content to politically balanced users ahead of the Polish election runoff, new Global Witness analysis shows
The new investigation reveals a pronounced skew in the content promoting the two presidential candidates, over that of centrist and left-wing candidates.
In the study conducted by Global Witness investigators, TikTok showed our test accounts five times more content supporting nationalist right candidate Karol Nawrocki as centrist candidate Rafal Trzaskowski. This is despite the centrist candidate’s official TikTok account being more popular at the time than his opponent’s, with 12,000 more followers and nearly 1 million more likes.
Global Witness campaign strategy lead Ava Lee said:
“When we found TikTok was sending new, politically balanced users disproportionately to far right content ahead of the Romanian election, the European Commission launched an investigation. When we found the same thing happening again ahead of the German election, we were seriously concerned about a potential pattern emerging.
“But when we looked at Poland, heading to the polls this week, we thought the results might have been different – particularly as the centrist candidate is so much more popular on the platform.
“Yet again, TikTok’s algorithm appears to be serving hard-right content over and above all other content.
“It raises the question, why is TikTok’s algorithm so into the hard right? And what is the Commission going to do about the fact that another Big Tech company may be distorting so many elections all over Europe?”
The findings come just two weeks after a Global Witness investigation in Romania found TikTok’s algorithm was serving nearly three times as much far-right content as all other political content, and similar tests around previous elections in Germany and Romania suggesting TikTok’s algorithm pushes users towards far-right content. TikTok is currently under investigation by the European Commission for its handling of election risks, with particular reference to the annulled Romania election in late 2024.
Our results suggest TikTok has not taken sufficient action to prevent its platform algorithm prioritising right-wing content and again risks undermining the integrity of a national election.
We gave TikTok the opportunity to comment on these findings. They said that our investigation was unscientific, misleading and the conclusions drawn from it were wrong.
More details about Global Witness’ investigation and TikTok’s response can be found here.
