TikTok on Wednesday unveiled its battle plan against the spate of misinformation expected to accompany the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, a problem tech companies are largely choosing for themselves how to deal with.
November’s contest that will decide who controls Congress will spawn innocently shared false information and deliberate attempts at misdirection on the major social networks – which have begun to announce how they will fight back.
TikTok started by reminding users that the ban on political advertising includes videos that the platform pays people to make, Eric Han, head of the U.S. Department of Security, said in a blog post.
“If we find that political content has been paid for and improperly disclosed, it will be promptly removed from the platform,” Han said.
TikTok has launched a “Voting Hub” that will help users know how and where to vote, and includes videos designed to encourage people to think critically about online content, he added.
The widely used video-sharing app will add links to its election hub to content identified as related to the midterm elections, along with government, politician or political party accounts.
TikTok will use automated systems and human fact-checkers to assess the accuracy of content, prompting users to “reconsider” sharing posts with unsubstantiated information, Han said.
The Fair Election Center’s Campus Vote Project, one of the organizations working with TikTok, is helping to provide information for registration and voting, national director Mike Burns said.
“We saw historic youth and student turnout in the 2018 and 2020 elections,” Burns said.
According to a recent report by Pew Research, TikTok has emerged as a top social media platform for US teenagers.
Facebook mother Meta said this week that the safety precautions they are taking for the midterms will build on the lessons learned.
“As in 2020, we have a dedicated team dedicated to fighting election and voter interference while helping people get reliable information about when and how to vote,” said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, in a blog post on Tuesday.
Meta-security operations will combat foreign interference and domestic influence campaigns and will include new measures to keep poll workers safe, Clegg said.
Meta will remove misinformation about the voting process, poll results or voting integrity, and will ban new election-related ads in the final week of the campaign, he added.
“Once again, we stand ready to respond to content that discusses the integrity of the election by posting labels that connect people to reliable information,” Clegg said.
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