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TikTok is riddled with misleading information, including about Covid-19, climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a new study says.
Researchers at NewsGuard scoured the social media platform for content on important news topics and found that almost one in five videos automatically suggested by TikTok contained misinformation.
For example, a search for information on “mRNA vaccines” found five videos (out of the top 10) that contained misinformation, including unfounded claims that Covid-19 vaccines would cause “permanent damage to critical organs in children.”
Researchers looking for information on TikTok for information about abortion, the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol uprising, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine found similarly misleading videos interspersed with more accurate clips.
Steven Brill, founder of NewsGuard, a company that monitors misinformation, said the amount of misinformation and how easy it was to spot was especially troubling given TikTok’s popularity among young people.
TikTok is the second most popular domain name in the world, after Google, according to online performance and security firm Cloudflare.
Mr. Brill questioned whether ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, was doing enough to stop misinformation, or whether it was knowingly allowing it to spread to sow chaos in the United States and other Western democracies.
“It’s either incompetence or something worse,” he told The Associated Press.
TikTok issued a statement in response to the NewsGuard report, stating that its community guidelines prohibit harmful misinformation and are committed to promoting authoritative content on important topics such as Covid-19.
“We do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform,” the company said.
TikTok has taken other steps it says are aimed at directing users to trusted sources.
This year, for example, the company created an election hub to help U.S. voters find polling locations or candidate information.
The platform removed more than 102 million videos that violated its rules in the first quarter of 2022.
However, only a fraction of them violated TikTok’s rules against misinformation.
In some cases, TikTok’s own search tool appears to be designed to lead users to false claims, the researchers found.
For example, when a researcher types the term “Covid vaccine” into a search tool, the tool suggests searches for keywords such as “Covid vaccine exposure” and “Covid vaccine injury.”
However, when the same search was run on Google, the search engine suggested searches related to more accurate information about vaccine clinics, different types of vaccines and booster shots.
TikTok’s rise in popularity has caught the attention of state officials and federal politicians, some of whom have expressed concerns about its data privacy and security.
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