Study says that TikTok algorithm prioritized Republican content
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.
"Our finding isn't just about reinforcement; Democratic accounts were shown significantly more anti-Democratic content than Republican accounts were shown anti-Republican content," said Talal Rahwan, one of the study's authors, in The Guardian. "The algorithm wasn't just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them."
TikTok said in a statement that the study doesn't reflect how people use the platform. "In reality, people discover and watch a wide variety of content on our platform which they continuously shape and can control through more than a dozen tools the authors seem unaware of."
The Guardian reported that about 42 percent of social media users in the United States say social media is important for involvement in political and social issues, according to Pew Research. The study's authors noted that the age 18 to 29 demographic in the United States, which uses TikTok more than other adults, shifted about 10 percentage points toward President Donald Trump between the 2020 and 2024 elections.
The study also said that the content of partisan videos differed as well. Democrat-leaning accounts were recommended more cross-partisan content on immigration and crime, while Republican-learning accounts were recommended more on abortion.
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This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 5:10 PM.