A new edition of NewsGuard’s Misinformation Monitor – edited by Alex Cadier, Chine Labbé, Virginia Padovese, Giulia Pozzi, Sara Badilini, Roberta Schmid, Madeline Roache and Jack Brewster – accuses TikTok of providing its users with false and misleading content about the war in Ukraine within 40 minutes of their registration on the app, with no need for them to actively search on the subject. Not only that: NewsGuard also found that searching for content using generic terms related to the conflict, such as “Ukraine” or “Donbass”, led TikTok to suggest several videos that contained misinformation in the top 20 proposed results.
The conflict
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In March 2022, a team of six NewsGuard analysts created new accounts on TikTok and ran two experiments designed to simulate normal use of the app. In the first experiment, analysts were asked to scroll through the personalized “For You” feed for 45 minutes, watching all the videos related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict in full, but without following any accounts or performing any search. Within 40 minutes of their registration on TikTok, all NewsGuard analysts were shown false or misleading content about the war in Ukraine. Such false information was in some cases in favor of Russia, in others of Ukraine.
The conflict
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In summary, here are the false claims also spread by the Kremlin:
- the footage from the war in Ukraine is fake;
- Ukraine is ruled by a neo-Nazi junta;
- the United States owns a network of biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine;
- Vladimir Putin and Russia are not the aggressors in this conflict and the United States orchestrated the 2014 revolution in Ukraine.
And those false or misinformation content:
- US forces are “on their way” to Ukraine;
- Putin’s image was digitally added in the footage of the press conference on March 5, 2022 to hide the fact that the President was not in Moscow;
- a video of Ukrainian President Zelensky “out there fighting for his country”, which was actually shot in 2021;
- video of the “Ghost of Kiev” shooting down six Russian jets, images actually from the Digital Combat Simulator video game;
- a video of a “Ukrainian army against Russia” firefight, which actually dates back to 2015 and shows Ukrainian government troops fighting pro-Russian rebels in the east of the country.
Squad303
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In any case, TikTok has had a surge in popularity since its launch in 2017. By the end of 2021, the app reached over 1 billion monthly active users, up from 85 million at the beginning of 2018, numbers that did. made the first non-Facebook app to touch that figure. According to Statista, a quarter of app users in the United States in 2021 were between the ages of 10 and 19, despite TikTok claiming that it only allows children over the age of 13 to use its app. Bloomberg reported that around 30% of French TikTok users are under the age of 18, as well as a third of Italian users and nearly a quarter of German users.