TikTok’s algorithm may have quietly tilted the 2024 election conversation toward Republicans, feeding millions of young Americans a politically uneven reality.

Trump was loud about the 2020 election being rigged. But the TikTok algorithms might have “rigged” the very elections he won, researchers show, as pro-Republican content reigned on the application used by 170 million US citizens.

A study published May 6th, 2026, in Nature magazine, found that TikTok's algorithm systematically prioritized pro-Republican content in three US states during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Researchers Talal Rahwan and Yasir Zaki at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus created 323 dummy bot accounts and conditioned them to mimic real user behavior. Some of the bots spent time watching pro-Democratic videos, while others were watching pro-Republican videos.

They then monitored the content recommended on TikTok’s “For You” page to these accounts throughout 27 weeks of the 2024 campaign, examining over 280,000 suggested videos through a combination of human and AI analysis.

Using mock GPS and VPN tools, the bot accounts were placed in three states: heavily Democratic New York, strongly Republican Texas, and the battleground state of Georgia.

TikTok algorithm loved Pro-Republican content

The algorithm wasn't just creating echo chambers. It was asymmetric. Pro-Republican bots saw 11.5% more content that agreed with their views compared to their pro-Democrat counterparts. This means that the algorithm reinforced conservative viewpoints more aggressively.

Pro-Democratic bots were 7.5% more likely to be shown pro-Republican content on their “For You” page, meaning Democratic-leaning accounts were disproportionately exposed to opposing viewpoints.

Issue-specific targeting was also observed. Pro-Democrat accounts were fed more cross-partisan content on immigration and crime, which is a perceived Democratic weakness, while pro-Republican accounts saw more content about the GOP’s weak spot – abortion.

“Our findings carry broad implications for both partisan politics and platform governance,” they wrote in the research paper.

The researchers note that young voters aged 18-29 years shifted by 10 percentage points toward Trump between 2020 and 2024, and TikTok has become a key source of political information for this demographic.

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Unlike other social media platforms, TikTok's “For You page” is almost entirely driven by the platform's algorithm, as users don't need to follow anyone, and the system decides what to show based on behavioral signals like watch time.

“Our results add to a mixed body of evidence on ideological bias across platforms. Previous work has shown that conservatives on Facebook are more likely to operate within insular networks and encounter misinformation, whereas studies on Twitter and YouTube point to both partisan amplification and user migration towards ideologically congenial content,” researchers note.

TikTok denies any wrongdoing

TikTok has a strong stance on the researchers' findings. In a statement, published by the Guardian, a spokesperson calls it an “artificial experiment” that does not reflect how people “actually use TikTok.”

“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,” a spokesperson said.

The researchers acknowledge the limitations of their study. It was confined to just three states, and the study has not analyzed whether the skewed content actually influenced political beliefs or voting behavior. Bots also only captured the early stages of a user's experience.

Emotions sell engagement, but also can make you far-right

All this might be far away from social media platforms being in favor of the Republican political agenda. The problem is that the tech companies prioritize high engagement, which comes from emotionally charged content. And often that’s exactly what conservative content is all about.

However, it can also make you change your political views with time. Research published in Nature in February by scientists from Bocconi University in Italy shows that X’s algorithms are influencing people’s political views.

They analyzed X’s default “For You” feed to find out that users who moved from the chronological feed to the “For You” feed became 4.7 percentage points more likely to prioritize policy issues commonly emphasized by US Republicans, such as crime, inflation, and immigration.

They were also more inclined to regard the criminal investigation into US President Donald Trump as unjustified.

Their views on the war in Ukraine also shifted in a more pro-Russia direction. For instance, these users were 7.4 percentage points less likely to hold a favorable opinion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They showed slightly higher overall scores on a pro-Russian attitude index.

Is TikTok leaning toward Trump?

With over 170 million users in the United States alone, the app has shaped political discourse during election cycles and raised scrutiny regarding its alleged ties to the Chinese government and potential threats to national security.

In March 2024, the White House overwhelmingly passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, giving ByteDance roughly six months to divest TikTok's US operations or face a nationwide ban.

By late 2025, ByteDance signed a binding agreement to spin off its US operations into a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, which was over 80% owned by Oracle.

The deal was formally signed in December 2025 and closed the following month. Under the arrangement, valued at roughly $14 billion, the TikTok algorithm would be copied and retrained using only US user data within Oracle's cloud.

However, with pro-Trump investors like Larry Ellison's Oracle at the helm, critics immediately raised concerns about both the below-market valuation and the possibility that TikTok could be reshaped to serve political interests.

Those fears appeared to materialize almost immediately after the deal closed. The new owners updated TikTok's privacy policy to permit more extensive data collection, while users reported that content critical of President Trump was being suppressed or held "under review."

Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, for instance, said a video he posted about immigration enforcement was held under review for nine hours.

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