Political Biases on X before the 2025 German Federal Election

Abstract

This study examines whether German X users would see politically balanced news feeds if they followed comparable leading politicians from each federal parliamentary party of Germany. We address this question using an algorithmic audit tool [1] and all publicly available posts published by 436 German politicians on X. We find that the default feed of X showed more content from far-right AfD than from other political parties. We analyze potential factors influencing feed content and the resulting political non-representativeness of X. Our 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.

Figures (4)

• 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).
• Figure 2: The number of likes, retweets, and quote tweets per average post published in January 2024 by the 436 German parliamentarians grouped by their political party.
• Figure 3: The number of likes, retweets, and quote tweets per average post of AfD leader, Alice Weidel, published between March 25, 2024, and February 1, 2025.
• Figure 4: The estimated significant increases, per tweet per feed consumer, in the For You feed appearances for each of the German parties, after taking into account differences in the numbers of engagements and engagement ratios. We estimate these increases with respective regression coefficients. For the SPD and Greens they are not significantly different from zero. All other estimated increases are significant (p-values below 0.001). The differences in the numbers of tweets per party do not affect these results, since the estimates are computed per tweet.