Half of young European adults, including Romanians, feel disappointment, fear, anger, or sadness when encountering political and societal discussions on social media, according to the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra’s new study Algorithms and Democracy: How social media shapes young Europeans’ worldviews.
The result was similar in all the countries studied: Finland, France, and Romania, as highlighted by the study conducted in collaboration with the Behavioural Insights Team and Bondata.
Social media platforms have rapidly become central sources of information and key arenas for civic discourse in the digital age. “However, platforms are not neutral intermediaries of information. Through opaque algorithms, they steer public debate, people’s behaviour and emotions,” said Kristo Lehtonen, Director of International Programmes at Sitra.
Sitra seeks to protect and renew European democracy. To this end, it sought to examine how platform algorithms serve political content to young Europeans and to propose solutions to make the digital public sphere safer for democracy and for users.
The study consists of two complementary research components. The first component was a platform audit conducted by the global research consultancy, the Behavioural Insights Team. For the study, BIT created 18–24-year-old avatars, or virtual personas, on TikTok, Instagram, and X, and examined what kinds of political content the algorithms recommended to them in Finland, Romania, and France.
During the tests, the avatars encountered a total of 1,719 political posts on social media, which the researchers then classified. BIT’s avatars encountered, on average, substantially more right‑wing content than left‑wing or centrist content on social media platforms. This pattern persisted even when the avatars expressed interest in left‑wing politics.
Romanian feeds were an exception: they were largely dominated by centrist content, particularly government communications. Of all 1,719 political posts encountered by the avatars, 58% were right-wing, 26% were left-wing, and 16% were centrist.
The results point to the ongoing deterioration of social media quality, as platforms shift from prioritising users’ experience to maximising engagement and monetisation, the same source said.
As much as 67% of all political content encountered by the avatars was opinion-based, entertainment, and unverifiable in nature. Much of the content was sensationalist, polarising, and often promoted extremist views. Examples included AI-generated videos of gorillas telling misogynistic and xenophobic jokes, as well as memes expressing support for Nazi ideology.
“Such content does not violate platform rules and cannot be fact-checked. However, when this type of political content becomes dominant on social media, it creates an environment in which constructive civic discussion is difficult,” said Ilkka Räsänen, Project Lead of the Algorithms and Democracy project and Head of EU Affairs at Sitra.
The second component was a survey conducted by the Finnish research company Bondata among 18-29-year-olds living in the same countries. The survey examined, among other things, what kinds of emotions social media content evokes in young European adults.
In Bondata’s survey, more than one-third of young adults in Finland, France, and Romania reported encountering misinformation, conspiracy theories, hate speech, or hostile speech regularly or repeatedly on social media. Half of the respondents said they feel frustration, anger, fear, or sadness when following political discussions on social media.
(Photo source: Topias Dean|Sitra)
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