How many TikTok swipes does it take to come across Nazi propaganda? Not as many as you think.
Photo illustration by Sandra Riaño. Photos in composite: Thiago Prudêncio/SOPA Images/Getty Images; Kenny Williamson/Getty iStockusers to wander down a far-right rabbit hole, they tried an experiment. They created Alice, a fictional 41-year-old from Acton, Massachusetts, gave her a TikTok account, and tracked what the social media app showed her.
To their surprise, it only took 75 minutes of scrolling — with no interaction or cues about her interests — for the platform to serve Alice videos featuring Nazi content, following a detour through clips on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation suit, Donald Trump, and other right-wing culture war flashpoints.
Staff described the exercise as “just one of the Committee’s experiments that further evidenced the power of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm in creating rabbit holes toward potentially harmful content.” The experiment is detailed in a draft summary of investigative findings prepared by the committee’s social media team and obtained by. The company mostly escaped notice in the public battles over the role of social media and moderation in combating extremism, including the kind that led to the Capitol attack.
TikTok survived its first brush with regulation when former President Trump tried and failed to ban the app from the U.S. and force its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell off the platform to an American company.
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