Sunday, February 16, 2025
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TikTok is Still Struggling to Curb Misinformation, Observes Say

TikTok approved 90 per cent of advertisements featuring election misinformation submitted by researchers

TikTok risks being a major vector for election misinformation and disinformation across the world, experts have warned.   

Latest data from Global Witness, a digital watchdog, and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at New York University, indicate that TikTok has failed to discriminate huge volumes of election misinformation in the weeks leading up to the vote.

TikTok approved 90 per cent of advertisements featuring election misinformation submitted by researchers, including: “ads containing the wrong election date, false claims about voting requirements, and rhetoric dissuading people from voting.”

The sixth most popular social media platform has over the years prohibited political advertising including branded content from creators and paid advertisements. Responding to claims that the platform was aiding deliberate misinformation around elections, the company’s global business president Blake Chandlee said, “TikTok is, first and foremost, an entertainment platform.”

However, the NYU study showed that TikTok “performed the worst out of all of the platforms tested by approving more of the false advertisements than other sites such as YouTube and Facebook.”

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The findings have elicited justified concern among experts who note that such posts could have significant electoral implications.

During previous major elections in the US, TikTok had far fewer users, but misinformation was already spreading widely on the app. TikTok equally failed to curb misinformation and disinformation during the 2022 general elections in Kenya and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis.

“This year is going to be much worse as we near the midterms,” said Olivia Little, a researcher who co-authored the Media Matters report. “There has been an exponential increase in users, which only means there will be more misinformation TikTok needs to proactively work to stop or we risk facing another crisis.”

 

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