By Thomas Escritt
BERLIN (Reuters) – Germans who get their news through TikTok are less likely to see China as a dictatorship, be less critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and be more sceptical about climate change and the utility of vaccines than consumers of other media.
The findings, in a poll by Allensbach for a foundation linked to Germany’s liberal, pro-business Free Democrats, showed that only users of Elon Musk’s platform X came close to the same propensity for believing in conspiracy theories as TikTok users.
Coming as debates rage in the U.S. over whether a law shutting the Chinese-owned app down on national security grounds should be enforced or not, the poll provides ammunition to those who say the platform spreads misinformation that risks undermining pluralistic democracies.
Recent regional and European Parliament elections have shown that young people, the heaviest users of the video-sharing platform, are particularly likely to back the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now second in polls ahead of Germany’s Feb. 23 election.
The poll of some 2,000 people conducted at the end of 2024 found consumers of traditional media were far more likely to view Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as illegal and believe Germany should support Kyiv – something the AfD opposes.
TikTok, whose parent company is China’s ByteDance, did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the survey.
Researchers have warned that foreign actors, especially Russia, are actively seeding popular social media platforms with disinformation designed to advance their agenda – a phenomenon most recently seen in Romania where a social media campaign helped a pro-Russian outsider storm to a shock victory in a presidential election that was later annulled.
While 57% of German newspaper readers and 56.5% of public TV viewers fully agreed that China was a dictatorship, only 28.1% of those who got news from TikTok did so. Those who got their news from X, YouTube and podcasts fell in between.
Where 40.2% of national newspaper readers fully agreed it was important the West backed Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, only 13.6% of TikTok users and 29.8% of X users did so.The survey did not address whether the sharply differing views were the result of the information offered on the platforms themselves or because their users already held different opinions on public affairs.
But the under-29s, the heaviest users of TikTok, were more likely to bear the marks of its information environment: only 71% of the under 29s believed vaccines had saved millions of lives, falling to 69% of TikTok users.
TikTok users were also less likely than consumers of traditional media to believe China and Russia spread false information and more likely to believe the German government did so.
“Young people are far more vulnerable to information and TikTok plays a decisive role,” said Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, deputy chair of the foundation that commissioned the survey. “We mustn’t allow Chinese and Russian misinformation to spread in our midst.”
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Ros Russell)
