Every Fifth Post in Your Feed? German States Want a Legal Quota for “Diversity-Promoting” Media

Scroll, scroll, scroll – and every fifth post chosen by law. That is the idea in a 186-page draft that Germany’s states have put out for consultation.

The Broadcasting Commission of the Länder proposes in the second part of its Digital Media State Treaty (DMStV II) a statutory minimum quota for social media feeds. At least one in five algorithmically served recommendations would have to come from a pool of media offers judged especially relevant for forming public opinion. The draft says the 20 percent figure is loosely modelled on the share of ads already found in feeds.

“Das sind die Werkzeuge zum Aufspalten von Monopolen, die wir im digitalen Bereich längst brauchen.”

“These are the tools for breaking up monopolies that we have long needed in the digital sphere.”

— Christoph Schmitz-Dethlefsen, ver.di federal board, quoted by Epoch Times

Public broadcasters in by default

Public broadcasters ARD, ZDF and Deutschlandradio would qualify automatically. Private outlets would have to apply to be counted as “diversity-promoting”, and the state media authorities – the Landesmedienanstalten – would decide who gets in. The states argue that journalism must be protected from “algorithmic displacement” and that a weaker, more uniform media landscape justifies what they themselves call “considerable market interventions”.

The union ver.di cheers the plan, saying a few “ideologically driven tech oligarchs like Elon Musk” now decide what is visible online. Critics see something else: state-licensed media pushed into private feeds. On X, Austrian activist Martin Sellner summed it up as a plan to force platforms to promote “state-approved” content.

Media lawyer Jörg Frederik Ferreau noted at the Frankfurt Book Fair that the draft would also require such outlets to be highlighted in search engines and AI-generated summaries.