Misinformation thrives on TikTok before US midterms

NEW YORK • Before the US midterm elections this autumn, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, researchers who track online falsehoods say.

The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads - the platform's enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm - can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain.

Baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month. The spread of misinformation has left TikTok struggling with many of the same knotty free speech and moderation issues that Facebook and Twitter have faced, and have addressed with mixed results, for several years.

But the challenge may be even more difficult for TikTok. Video and audio - the bulk of what is shared on the app - can be far more difficult to moderate than text, especially when they are posted with a tongue-in-cheek tone. TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, also faces many doubts in Washington about whether its business decisions about data and moderation are influenced by its roots in Beijing.

"When you have extremely short videos with extremely limited text content, you just don't have the space and time for nuanced discussions about politics," said Ms Kaylee Fagan, a research fellow with the Technology and Social Change Project at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Centre.

The company insists it is committed to combating false information. In the second half of 2020, it removed nearly 350,000 videos that included election misinformation, disinformation and manipulated media, said a report it released last year.

The platform's filters kept an additional 441,000 videos with unsubstantiated claims from being recommended to users, the report said.

The service blocked so-called deepfake content and coordinated misinformation campaigns before the 2020 election, made it easier for users to report election falsehoods and partnered 13 fact-checking organisations, including PolitiFact.

Researchers like Ms Fagan said TikTok had worked to shut down problematic search terms, although its filters remain easy to evade with creative spelling.

"We take our responsibility to protect the integrity of our platform and elections with utmost seriousness," TikTok said in a statement. "We continue to invest in our policy, safety and security teams to counter election misinformation."

TikTok's design makes it a breeding ground for misinformation, researchers at the Shorenstein Centre found. They wrote that videos could easily be manipulated and republished on the platform and showcased alongside stolen or original content.

The Shorenstein Centre researchers noted, however, that TikTok is less vulnerable to so-called brigading, in which groups coordinate to make a post spread widely, than platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

During the first quarter of the year, more than 60 per cent of videos with harmful misinformation were viewed by users before being removed, TikTok said. Last year, a group of behavioural scientists who had worked with TikTok said an effort to attach warnings to posts with unsubstantiated content had reduced sharing by 24 per cent but had limited views by only 5 per cent.

Researchers said that misinformation would continue to thrive on TikTok as long as the platform refused to release data about the origins of its videos or share insight into its algorithms. Last month, TikTok said it would offer some access to a version of its application programming interface this year, but it would not say whether it would do so before the midterms.

US lawmakers are calling for more information about TikTok's operations, amid renewed concerns that the company's ties to China could make it a national security threat. The company has said it plans to keep data about its American users separate from its Chinese parent.

It has also said its rules have changed since it was accused of censoring posts seen as antithetical to Beijing's policy goals.

NYTIMES