Political Bias on X before the 2025 German Federal Election
In advance of the elections on on 23 February 2025, a team1 led by Assistant Professor Przemyslaw Grabowicz in the UCD School of Computer Science examined whether German X users would see politically balanced news feeds if they followed comparable leading politicians from each federal parliamentary party of Germany.
X users can choose between two content feeds, called For You and Following feeds. The default feed is the For You feed. Both feeds rank content algorithmically, but the Following feed contains posts exclusively of users followed by the feed owner, prioritizing recent content. By contrast, only 20% of posts shown in the For You feed are from the users they are following.
Researchers created two sock-puppet X accounts, made them follow the same set of German politicians, and tracked their feeds for 4 weeks in January 2025. The sock puppets followed seven to nine members from each of the eight major German federal parliamentary parties (ordered from left-wing to right-wing: BSW, Linke, SPD, Greens, FDP, CDU, CSU, AfD).
Figure 1: The fraction of the For You feed occurrences (red bars) and posts on X (yellow bars) in January 2024 of the 436 members of eight German political parties, ordered by their political ideology: from far left (BSW) to far right (AfD).
They found that the posts of the far-right AfD politicians appeared most frequently in the For You feed, accounting for about 37.9% of posts in the feed, even though the AfD politicians posted only 15.2% of the tweets by politicians during this time (see Figure 1). Similarly, the posts of the other German populist party, the left-wing BSW, appeared 10.6% times in the For You feed, despite the fact that their politicians created only 1.4% of politician tweets.
These results show that X disproportionately highlights extremes of the German political spectrum, in particular the populist parties: left-wing BSW and right-wing AfD. For the three largest non-populist German parties – CDU, SPD, and Greens – the results are very different. Their members appeared less frequently in the For You feed in January than they tweeted.
The top three most-appearing in the For You feed are: (1) Elon Musk, who supports AfD, (2) Alex Jones, an American far-right radio show host, and (3) Dennis Hohloch from AfD.
They researchers analyzed potential factors influencing feed content and the resulting political non-representativeness of X. Their 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. The researchers provide details and discuss their analysis in their (opens in a new window)research report here https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14880274
(1) The team included Tabia Tanzin Prama, Chhandak Bagchi, Vishal Kalakonnavar, Paul Krauß and Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz.
19 February 2025