Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party from Germany, won the regional elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on September 6th. The victory marks a turning point in German democracy, which had left no room for an extremist party since the end of World War II, and reflects the growing advance of conservatism across Europe. The party plans to demand the closure of borders, tighten asylum law, and accelerate the deportation of foreigners deemed a threat to the country’s security.
Doesn’t this story sound familiar? If Germany – a country shaped by the memory of the Holocaust – has gone back to spreading conservative ideals, how can we expect the rest of the world not to follow the same path?
A study titled “The Youth Gender Gap in Support for the Far Right”, conducted in 2025 using data from the European Election Studies 2024, found that far-right parties received 21% support among young men, and this isn’t just a European phenomenon. According to AP VoteCast, men aged 18-29 went sharply to the right, with 56% of respondents voting for Trump in 2024, a reversal from 2020, when the majority backed Biden. In Brazil, the outlook is the same: the “Juventudes: Um Desafio Pendente” survey, conducted in 2025, found that 38% of young people aged 16-35 identify with the right, 17% of them with the far right against just 18% who identify with the left.
Is there a concrete reason behind this rise? And could that reason be social media’s algorithm?
The Bias of your Feed
When you open X, what are the odds for a conservative post to show up on your feed? And what about a liberal one? It might sound trivial to think the algorithm has any real influence over what you see, but research shows it does. Your feed is biased.
A study published in the journal Nature analyzed 4,965 active X users in the U.S., split between the algorithmic feed (“For You”) and the chronological feed, over 7 weeks in 2023. Research identified that conservative posts were 20% more likely to appear in the algorithmic feed, compared to just 3.1% for liberal posts. How much can a feed that tilts, on its own, toward conservatism shape your vote in an election?
The same study was able to track user behavior even after that seven-week period of exposure to this imbalanced feed. Those who used “For You” began giving more weight to conservative issues and changed their behavior, following more right-wing activist accounts on their own. The effect didn’t disappear once participants went back to the chronological feed, and a single feed nudged users into a new habit, even after the algorithm stopped pushing it.
The algorithm doesn’t need to decide anyone’s vote. It just needs to decide which issues to show you, which outrages and which arguments will be on the minds of millions of voters in the months leading up to an election. The voting part is private, but the feed that shaped your vote is not.
Many assume this conservative tilt began when Elon Musk bought X, but the suspicion that social media shoves conservatism down your throat is old, almost a “cliché”. What this kind of study does is take that suspicion out of the realm of opinion and place it in the realm of experiment. This isn’t an isolated study or a researcher with their own bias trying to prove a point, but the same result showing up in different forms, at different times, before and after the platform changed owners.
Is This the End of Democracy?
Once you accept that the algorithm is biased, the AfD’s win in Saxony-Anhalt and the rise of conservative ideologies more broadly starts to make sense. It’s the same story repeating itself, with different fonts. What they do share, however, are the same three or four platforms deciding what shows up on the screen of a 22-year-old, whether they’re German, Brazilian, American, or South Korean.
That’s why the idea that democracy is untouchable, or that once it’s won it can never be taken away, is a lie, and Germany is the living proof of that. A country that built its entire postwar political identity around “never again” is now watching a new generation, one that didn’t live through the war and grief, but only heard about it in a history class, flirting with the same vocabulary their grandparents swore to bury.
Young people themselves aren’t a threat to democracy. What changes the picture is how this generation is arriving at these positions using an approach that doesn’t value through debating, reading, studying, but through a feed that was designed to capture attention, not to build citizenship.
What’s strange is that conservative rhetoric has stayed the same for decades: anger, fear, the sense of threat that “the other side” is going to take something from you. That’s not fertile ground for democracy, but for authoritarianism.
We often ask ourselves, “how did Hitler’s ideas manage to reach power?” or “how did Germany get to that point?”, and it’s simple: authoritarianism always sells the same promise, I’ll fix this fast, without the tedious constraints of consensus politics.” When an entire generation grows up fed a steady diet of outrage posts, it makes sense that they’d start seeing democratic institutions as the problem, rather than the solution.
Perhaps the real concern now should be what these young people are consuming on social media, and how much it’s shaping their opinions – before Germany, and therest of the world, repeat its own history -.
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The article above was edited by Melissa Fernandes de Melo
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