Wildly popular social network TikTok approved adverts containing political disinformation ahead of European polls, a report showed Tuesday (4 June), flouting its own guidelines and raising questions about its ability to detect election falsehoods.
"TikTok has failed miserably in this test,” said Henry Peck, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, the organization that cobducted the study.
The fake ads, submitted by the group last month, all contained content that could pose a risk to electoral processes — including warnings to voters to stay home over a danger of poll violence and a spike in contagious diseases.
They also included a fake notice raising the legal voting age to 21 and appeals for people to vote by email, which is not permitted in European elections.
Citing an internal investigation, the Chinese ByteDance-owned app said its systems correctly identified the breach, but the ads were approved due to “human error” by a moderator.
Can we stop trying to pretend that the Internet is supposed to be some sort of bastion of truth so we can actually use it again, instead of watching corporation after corporation completely fail to grasp the basic nature of the technology?