E-Paper
Nearly 1 in 5 TikTok videos on news topics riddled with misinformation: Report
NewsGuard, a misinformation monitoring firm, analysed 540 TikTok results, based on reviewing the top 20 results from 27 searches on news topics.
A research report released this month has said search results on TikTok on various news topics, including the Covid pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine, are riddled with misinformation.
Researchers at NewsGuard, a misinformation monitoring firm, searched for content about prominent news topics on TikTok and said they found that nearly one of the five videos automatically recommended by the short-form video hosting platform had misinformation.
NewsGuard's co-chief executive officer (CEO) Steven Brill said the amount of misinformation and the ease with which it could be found was troubling given TikTok's popularity with the youth.
The misinformation monitoring firm analysed 540 TikTok results, based on reviewing the top 20 results from 27 searches on news topics.
“Of the search results, NewsGuard found that 105 videos — 19.4 per cent — contained false or misleading claims. These search terms included neutral phrases, such as '2022 election' and 'mRNA vaccine', as well as searches that might be used to learn more about controversial news topics, such as 'January 6 FBI' and 'Uvalde tx conspiracy', the report said.
Also Read| Hacker may have exposed personal data of over 1 billion TikTok users: Report
Giving a few examples, NewsGuard said when users searched for climate change on TikTok, the platform suggested searches for “climate change debunked” and “climate change doesn’t exist".
When searching for Covid vaccine, TikTok suggested searching for “covid vaccine injury", “covid vaccine truths", “covid vaccine exposed", “covid vaccine HIV", and “covid vaccine warning", the report added.
Similar misleading videos were found on the Ukraine war, the 2020 United States Presidential elections and the January 6 Capitol siege.
Brill questioned whether ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, was doing enough to stop this misinformation or whether it deliberately allowed misinformation to proliferate as a way to sow confusion in the United States and other democracies in the West, Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
“It's either incompetence or it's something worse,” Brill told AP.
TikTok, meanwhile, responded to the NewsGuard report by saying, “We do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform.”
