This report was published by ISD Germany (February 22, 2025).

Ahead of Germany’s federal election on February 23, 2025, ISD Germany investigated how TikTok handled party-political content in its recommendation feeds. The study focuses on two core questions: how consistently TikTok applied election-information labels to political content, and whether algorithmic amplification patterns favored any particular party.

Key Findings

Widespread labeling failures. TikTok only classified 59% of content from official party and candidate accounts as political — meaning more than 40% of clearly partisan content received no election-information label. Fan page content fared even worse, with only 47% labeled. Overall, 45% of videos from official party accounts or fan pages carried no notice linking to election-related information.

AfD disproportionately represented in early political content. Across test accounts, AfD content accounted for 49% of the first five political videos shown — a striking overrepresentation relative to the party’s actual support. This pattern held across accounts with differing political orientations.

Political content remains a small share of the overall feed. No test account saw more than 30% of its overall feed classified as political. TikTok remains predominantly an entertainment platform, but the political content that does appear is not distributed neutrally.

Full Report

The full report (in German) is available at isdgermany.org.