This report was written by Francesca Giannaccini, Ognjan Denkovski, and Duncan Allen. This paper is part of the access://democracy project funded by the Mercator Foundation. Its contents do not necessarily represent the position of the Mercator Foundation.
Executive Summary
With the German federal elections approaching, DRI continues to investigate the prevalence and spread of “murky” political accounts on TikTok. In previous reporting, DRI found murky accounts to be a persistent problem, one which continues to challenge TikTok’s enforcement of its policies and represents a threat to online electoral discourse on the platform across numerous EU member states.1 In this study, we found that the AfD party remains the largest beneficiary of these accounts in Germany by a significant margin. While we also identified murky accounts supporting other parties, suggesting that they or their supporters may be adopting a similar approach, their follower counts and engagement levels were largely insignificant in comparison.