​Campaign week: As long as young people are getting their information from somewhere? – Social media and the dark side of opinion-forming

​“Democracy needs many voices” is a week of action organised by the Federal Association of Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers, of which Klambt Verlag is a member. Delius Klasing, as part of Klambt Verlag, is also taking part in this broad alliance and is publishing a selection of articles in connection with this initiative.

By Thomas Höppner

Young people aged between 12 and 19 in Germany spend just under four hours a day on their smartphones. This is the finding of the representative JIM Study 2025. According to the study, they no longer read newspapers or watch the Tagesschau news programme. That said, a third of them say they keep up to date with the news via Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or YouTube.

So everything’s fine then: as long as young people are getting their information from somewhere? The big tech platforms are reinforcing this approach even further. After all, they say, influencers are also reporting on the news there. And: that’s what modern journalism looks like.

At the very least since the findings from the lawsuits against Meta, Google (YouTube) and TikTok – which revealed that these companies deliberately made children and young people addicted – this benevolent interpretation of new media consumption can no longer be sustained.

In their opening statement against Meta on 18 August 2026, the 29 US states bringing the case summarised the allegations in a phrase reminiscent of the tobacco addiction lawsuits of the 1990s: Meta had “lured, retained, harvested and then concealed the truth” from young users – hook, hold, harvest, hide. As early as March 2026, a US jury had held Meta and Google liable for the design of their platforms; not for the content itself, but for features such as autoplay, infinite scrolling and push notifications, which are specifically designed to be addictive. In August 2026, a judge in New Mexico declared Meta’s platforms a ‘public nuisance’ and compared the company to a factory whose advertising business emitted ‘noxious pollution’ – harmful emissions that endangered the health and well-being of the entire community.

These proceedings have already shown that the largest social media operators prioritise their advertising business above all else, particularly at the expense of the health and development of their youngest users. But those who fail to protect children’s health are certainly not going to place any value on their balanced education and access to information. A business model that sacrifices the protection of children and young people for the sake of user engagement and advertising revenue is unlikely to prioritise quality of information over polarising, extreme content if the latter generates more engagement than balanced content.

Yet this is precisely where an immense danger to the democratic decision-making process lies. The scenario is as follows: a large proportion of eligible voters use social media as a source of news, often even as their sole source. At the same time, these platforms systematically prioritise extreme viewpoints over balanced ones in order to maximise reach. As a result, public opinion shifts towards the fringes; it becomes more difficult to form opinions from the social centre. Extremism becomes ‘mainstream’ – and, through elections, a reality.

It is high time that media regulators stepped in. The press and broadcasters are liable for false statements – social media platforms, on the other hand, are allowed to amplify them algorithmically with impunity, thereby giving them widespread reach. Through this imbalance, Google and Meta are increasingly depriving editorial media of attention and advertising revenue – and thus of their economic basis.

Press funding – promised in the coalition agreement but not yet implemented – would not be a romanticised notion of subsidies, but rather a response to a competitive environment that has long ceased to be fair, with players subject to unequal levels of liability and regulation. Anyone who recognises this but continues to leave the press and broadcasting solely to market forces is, in effect, opting for an information ecosystem whose guiding principles are no longer truth and the formation of opinion, but dwell time and polarisation.

The author: Professor Dr Thomas Höppner, a partner at the law firm Geradin Partners, is a solicitor specialising in competition law.

The study cited: JIM Study – Youth, Information and Media 2025 https://mpfs.de/studien/jim-studie/

​Find out more at democracy-needs-lots-of-votes.de