TikTok preps for midterm misinformation chaos

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In a few short years, TikTok has grown into one of the fastest-growing social networks in the world, and with the upcoming election season heating up, the app is preparing to take on the issue of election misinformation.

The head of US safety at TikTok, Eric Han, outlined in a Wednesday post how the company plans to fight misinformation. The Election Center will be rolled out this week in order to provide authoritative voting information and results from the AP once they are reported. The Election Center will be linked out to by TikTok through labels on videos posted by politicians and governments.

Han said that the platform is expanding its policy to prohibit paid content. The Biden-Harris campaign collaborated with other groups to reach voters who were spending more time online as a result of the coronaviruses.

"TikTok does not allow paid political ads, and that includes content creators who are paid to create," Han wrote in a Wednesday post.

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The ban on partisan ads on TikTok was upheld by the Mozilla Foundation. Last year, TikTok noted the disparity in a post- election report and now plans to publish new educational content for creators and management companies. If you are aligned with political groups, like Turning Point USA, you may not get paid for branded content. Han said that the ban didn't apply to these partnerships.

The purchase of Musical.ly by TikTok in August of last year was the start of the company gaining traction in the US. The app continued to grow in popularity throughout the 2020 presidential election but has only recently become a social media staple leading Facebook,Instagram, andTwitter in Apple's App Store charts. According to a recent report, around 67 percent of US teenagers use TikTok, which is more than any other social media app. The average American user spends around 80 minutes per day on TikTok, doubling the amount of time they spend on Facebook and other social media sites.

TikTok officials told reporters that they were committed to protecting the integrity of US elections. At TikTok, we are very proud that people come to our platform to share their own stories, not only that but also learn about other people's stories as well, and that would include discussions about current events that are happening around their world or in their world. While people are talking about elections, it is our job to protect our community from harm.

Major tech platforms are getting ready for the November elections. Last week, it was announced that the tools would be brought back. The Federal Election Commission and Google have come to an agreement that will allow candidates and political groups to get their messages to voter inboxes. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said in a Tuesday post that its approach to the upcoming elections would be in line with the policies and safeguards put in place for the 2020 presidential election.

Despite threats to ban the app in the US, TikTok continues to surge in popularity. Donald Trump tried to take TikTok offline multiple times. One of the executive orders signed by Trump sought to prohibit any transactions between US entities and Bytedance. The Commerce Department was instructed by the president to investigate TikTok's ties to Beijing.

TikTok was able to calm lawmaker concerns by establishing a relationship withOracle. Reports surfaced that Bytedance engineers in China had access to US data as early as January 2022, which led to an increase in threats. New details on how the app limits Chinese access to US data were provided in a letter written by the CEO of TikTok.

We aim to remove any doubts about the security of U.S. user data because we know we are among the most scrutinized platforms.