Impact Of Social Media Algorithms On Populism And Political Discourse

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 8:29 PM

impact of social media algorithms on populism and political discourse

New research shows the impact that social media algorithms can have on partisan political feelings, using a new tool that hijacks the way platforms rank content. How much does someone’s social media algorithm really affect how they feel about a political party, whether it’s one they identify with or one they feel negatively about? Until now, the answer has escaped researchers because they’ve had to rely on the cooperation of social media platforms. New, intercollegiate research published Nov. 27 in Science, co-led by Northeastern University researcher Chenyan Jia, sidesteps this issue by installing an extension on consenting participants’ browsers that automatically reranks the posts those users see, in real time and still... Jia and her team discovered that after one week, users’ feelings toward the opposing party shifted by about two points — an effect normally seen over three years — revealing algorithms’ strong influence on...

Received: 16 June 2025; Accepted: 12 Aug. 2025; Published: 07 Oct. 2025 Copyright: © 2025. The Author Licensee: AOSIS. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

In contemporary democracies, the right to free speech is a foundational safeguard of political legitimacy and public participation. Yet, in the digital age, this right is increasingly mediated by opaque and profit-driven algorithmic systems that determine what speech is visible, what circulates and what is suppressed. As social media platforms become the primary forums for discourse, algorithmic content curation – designed to maximise engagement rather than uphold democratic values – quietly reshapes who gets heard and on what terms. This transformation is not merely a matter of changing communication technologies; it marks a profound shift in the structure of the political and public sphere and the conditions under which speech can function as... Contribution: This article argues that algorithmic content curation on social media platforms undermines the legitimacy of democratic discourse, particularly for marginalised speech that serves to challenge dominant norms. It engages in an analysis of the democratic principles that give rise to speech protection and define its particular function for marginalised groups.

It contrasts these principles with the algorithmic practices of social media companies and considers the extent to which these principles may survive online, with a focus on how this diminishes marginalised groups’ participation in... This article contributes to the literature concerned with the compatibility of artificial intelligence and contemporary speech rights, as well as the literature concerned with the impact of artificial intelligence on principles of democracy. Keywords: artificial intelligence; democracy; free speech; minority rights; social media. In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, social media has become the big tent where everyone-from serious Political commentators to your uncle who shares cat memes-comes to discuss politics. But here's the kicker: a lot of the political Content you see on social platforms isn't just from people you follow.

In fact, about half of the tweets on the "For You" timeline come from accounts you don’t even know exist! So, what political thoughts are sneaking into your feed, and how does this play into our democratic conversations? Social media Algorithms are like tense magicians constantly at work behind the curtains. They decide which tweets pop up on our screens, all while we sip our coffee and swipe away. It’s no wonder that figuring out how these algorithms work feels like trying to guess a magician's next trick. Previous studies show that certain political voices get amplified within the tweets of accounts we do follow.

But what about those mysterious tweets from accounts we don’t follow? That’s where the real curiosity lies. As we gear up for the elections, we need to dig into how these algorithms influence the political content we consume and what that means for our points of view. To get to the bottom of this algorithmic mess, we created 120 "sock-puppet" accounts-basically, fake accounts with different political leanings. We set them loose in the wilds of social media to see what political content they were exposed to over three weeks. Our goal?

To find out if users with different political beliefs were being fed different kinds of political content, and whether there was any bias in the recommendations they received. Spoiler alert: we found some intriguing results. It turns out that the algorithm tends to favor a few popular accounts across the board, but right-leaning users got the short end of the stick when it came to Exposure inequality. Both left and right-leaning users saw more of what they agreed with, while encountering less of what they didn’t like. Moody College researcher leads unprecedented study with Meta exploring the role of social media in elections In the aftermath of the 2016 election, politicians, the media and everyday people raised numerous concerns about the effects of social media on democracy and how platforms like Facebook and Instagram influence people’s political...

What role do these powerful social networks and the algorithms that run them have in how people view candidates or feel about important issues? Over the past several years, a multi-university academic team has been working alongside Meta to answer these very important questions as part of an unprecedented research project co-led by Moody College Communication Studies professor... As part of the project, the team had access to data from Meta that has never before been made available to researchers and were given the ability to alter the Facebook and Instagram feeds... In the summer of 2023, researchers released their first findings from the project in a sweep of papers published in both Nature and Science journals. And while they found that algorithms have a tremendous effect on what people see on their feeds, changing these algorithms to change what people see doesn’t necessarily affect people’s political attitudes. Also, when the researchers looked at platform-wide data from U.S.

adults, they found that many political news URLs were seen, and engaged with, primarily by conservatives or liberals, but not both. A study shows that the order in which platforms like X display content to their users affects their animosity towards other ideological groups A team of U.S. researchers has shown that the order in which political messages are displayed on social media platforms does affect polarization — one of the most debated issues since the rise of social media and the... The phenomenon is equally strong regardless of the user’s political orientation, the academics note in an article published on Thursday in Science. Social media is an important source of political information.

For hundreds of millions of people worldwide, it is even the main channel for political engagement: they receive political content, share it, and express their opinions through these platforms. Given the relevance of social media in this sphere, understanding how the algorithms that operate on these platforms work is crucial — but opacity is the norm in the industry. That makes it extremely difficult to estimate the extent to which the selection of highlighted content shapes users’ political views. How did the researchers overcome algorithmic opacity to alter the order of posts that social media users see? Tiziano Piccardi from Stanford University and his colleagues developed a browser extension that intercepts and reorders the feed (the chronological timeline of posts) of certain social networks in real time. The tool uses a large language model (LLM) to assign a score to each piece of content, measuring the extent to which it contained “antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity” (AAPA).

Once scored, the posts were reordered one way or another — without any collaboration from the platform or reliance on its algorithm. The experiment involved 1,256 participants, who had all been duly informed. The study focused on X, as it is the social network most used in the U.S. for expressing political opinions, and it was conducted during the weeks leading up to the 2024 presidential election to ensure a high circulation of political messages. In the age of infinite scroll, algorithms don’t just recommend content, they reshape politics.Across the globe, right-wing populist movements have found their loudest amplifier not in parliaments or rallies, but in the invisible coding... From Brexit to Trumpism to rising populist parties in Europe, simplistic, emotionally charged narratives are turbocharged by algorithmic design.

But what happens when the very systems built to keep us engaged end up undermining moderation, nuance, and democracy itself? Social media platforms optimize for engagement, not truth. And research shows that anger, fear, and outrage spread faster than reasoned debate. “Algorithms are not neutral. They reward content that sparks reaction, often outrage, creating a megaphone for the loudest voices.”~ Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, Technology & Society Scholar

This design flaw gives populist movements an edge. Messages that are short, emotional, and polarizing outperform balanced or complex perspectives.

Impact Of Social Media Algorithms On Populism And Political Discourse

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