TikTok Let’s Political Disinformation Flow, Breaking its Own Ban

Published: October 21, 2024

TikTok Let’s Political Disinformation Flow, Breaking its Own Ban

Movieguide® Contributor

TikTok allowed ads that had presidential election disinformation to run on its platform—even though the platform has a ban on politic-based ads.

Global Witness, an NGO, “technology and environmental watchdog group submitted ads that it designed to test how well systems at social media companies work in detecting different types of election misinformation,” AP reported Oct. 17.

“The group, which did a similar investigation two years ago, did find that the companies — especially Facebook — have improved their content-moderation systems since then,” AP said. “But it called out TikTok for approving four of the eight ads submitted for review that contained falsehoods about the election. That’s despite the platform’s ban on all political ads in place since 2019.”

Global Witness pulled the ads from TikTok before they went live.

“Four ads were incorrectly approved during the first stage of moderation, but did not run on our platform,” a TikTok spokesman said. “We do not allow political advertising and will continue to enforce this policy on an ongoing basis.”

Global Witness also tested Facebook, which responded more appropriately to its own guidelines. It approved only one of the eight ads that the NGO sent through.

Meta said while “this report is extremely limited in scope and as a result, not reflective of how we enforce our policies at scale, we nonetheless are continually evaluating and improving our enforcement efforts.”

YouTube responded the best, per Global Witness. It approved four ads but didn’t let any of them publish.

“It asked for more identification from the Global Witness testers before it would publish them and ‘paused’ their account when they didn’t. However, the report said it is not clear whether the ads would have gone through had Global Witness provided the required identification.” AP added, “Google did not immediately respond to a message for comment.”

Global submitted all of the ads with text-based “algospeak,” which substituted some letters with numbers and symbols to bypass text moderation systems.

“A new study found that users who use the Chinese-language version of TikTok, Douyin, are likely to favor Chinese political views with anti-American sentiments.

“Companies nearly always have stricter policies for paid ads than they do for regular posts from users,” AP reported. “The ads submitted by Global Witness included outright false claims about the election — such as stating that Americans can vote online — as well as false information designed to suppress voting, like claims that voters must pass an English test before casting a ballot. Other fake ads encouraged violence or threatened electoral workers and processes.”

Capitol Technology University shared why TikTok is a prime breeding ground for disinformation: “TikTok provides the ideal platform for both misinformation and disinformation to pass as credible in part because content creators’ popularity may be misinterpreted as expertise, even where it doesn’t exist. Video length is capped at three minutes and most videos last less than 45 seconds, so there is little time to provide context and establish a nuanced discussion. A 2022 report found that roughly a fifth of TikTok videos contain misinformation.”

Earlier this year, The BBC also found that TikTok allowed videos of misleading UK election news.

“Young voters in key election battlegrounds are being recommended fake AI-generated videos featuring party leaders, misinformation, and clips littered with abusive comments,” The BBC reported. “…Videos which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views have promoted unfounded rumours that a major scandal prompted Rishi Sunak to call an early election and the baseless claim that Sir Keir Starmer was responsible for the failure to prosecute serial paedophile Jimmy Savile.”

Questions or comments? Please write to us here.