Everybody has the US Midterms on their radar and every major social network is working to get ahead of an expected rush of misinformation, division, angst, and hate, with each app deploying a range of new tools and tactics to better detect concerns and clarify official updates. This time around, TikTok is also involved, which now has a huge influence in the US.
TikTok on The Elections
Today, TikTok has outlined its election security measures, including a new Election Center to host official updates and information, new labels on candidate accounts, and updated guidance on political ads and endorsements.
To start, TikTok’s rolling out an updated Election Center to help[ provide users with trusted information about the polling process. TikTok’s Election Center will provide information on how to vote in your region, while also including additional voting information resources for people in special categories, including deaf voters, overseas citizens, service members, and more. All of these will be sourced from official providers to help maximize voter participation.
TikTok’s Election Center will also keep track of official poll results as they come in, providing extra transparency and reducing misinformation, which was already a major concern in the U.S last year. As such, official reminders and simple prompts like the Election Center can serve an important role in providing official information at scale, through the tools that people are already familiar with.
In addition, TikTok’s also adding new labels to content that’s been identified as relating to the 2022 Midterm elections, as well as all content from accounts belonging to governments, politicians, and political parties in the US. Besides this, TikTok was also keen to underline its fact-checking organizations in over 30 languages, allowing it to better enforce its rules around misinformation and false reports, which includes labels on questioned posts.
Small prompts like this can have a big impact, with Twitter reporting that its similar alerts on potentially offensive Tweet replies lead to a 30% reduction in negative interactions. On the last note, TikTok says that it doesn’t allow paid political ads and that it enforces strict rules for paid collaborations with influencers.
“We work to educate creators about the responsibilities they have to abide by our Community Guidelines and Advertising policies as well as FTC guidelines. Over the next few weeks, we’ll publish a series of educational content on our Creator Portal and TikTok, and host briefings with creators and agencies so the rules of the road are abundantly clear when it comes to paid content around elections. If we discover political content was paid for and not properly disclosed, it is promptly removed from the platform.”
The Wrap
So, whether you personally use it or not, whether you like it or not, whether or not you trust it, TikTok has become a hugely influential platform, with hundreds of millions of Americans now engaging with TikTok clips every day, which will inevitably bring it in the crosshairs of political campaigners that seek to influence and sway voters.
That being the case, it’s important for TikTok to actively combat election misinformation and keep its users informed where it can – we’ve already seen the app become a target for various types of political misinformation campaigns around global events.
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