May 6 (UPI) -- TikTok's algorithm showed pro-Republican content as a priority in three states leading up to the 2024 presidential election, a study released Wednesday in the journal Nature found.
The researchers behind the study created more than 300 dummy accounts based in New York, Texas and Georgia on the social media platform and had those accounts "watch" videos associated with U.S. Democrat- or Republican-leaning materials. Then they kept track of the videos the platform recommended via the accounts' main "For You" page.
The researchers chose TikTok because the "For You" videos come "almost entirely through algorithmic recommendation" and less through user control, the study said. The authors also said TikTok "remains relatively unexplored" in comparison to other social media platforms, despite its quick growth.
Those accounts, started with political content, "exhibited systematic, asymmetric differences in partisan exposure," the study said. Researchers collected more than 280,000 recommendations over 27 weeks across the accounts' "For You" pages.
They found that the accounts trained on Republican-leaning material received about 11.5% more videos agreeing with those views compared to the accounts trained on Democrat-leaning material. The accounts trained on Democrat-leaning material were about 7.5% more likely to get Republican-leaning content in their recommendations, the study found.
