Ahead of the US midterms, a look at TikTok's ongoing struggles to contain misinformation during elections, such as in Australia, France, and Kenya this year
The fast-growing platform's poor track record during recent voting abroad does not bode well for elections in the U.S., researchers said.
The arc here is consistent: TikTok removed over 300,000 US videos for election misinformation after the 2020 vote (per its own H2 2020 disclosure), yet researchers still found it struggling in Australia, France, and Kenya this year — suggesting the playbook of post-hoc guides and takedowns isn't holding up as the platform grows.
First-order effects
TikTok enters the US midterms under researcher-documented evidence that its moderation failed in three countries' elections within the year, putting the just-launched Elections Center's credibility on trial immediately.
Fact-checking organizations and civic-info partners tied to TikTok's election products face pressure to justify whether their labels and guides can keep pace with the For You feed's reach.
Second-order effects
Rival platforms with comparable short-video feeds inherit the scrutiny: if TikTok's recommendation-driven spread becomes the reference case, advertisers and election officials will demand equivalent transparency from any algorithmic feed during voting periods.
Election authorities in Australia, France, and Kenya gain concrete cases to cite when pressing TikTok locally, raising the compliance cost of running one global moderation policy across very different electoral systems.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — platform launches election infrastructure only after documented failures abroad — election integrity becomes a permanent, cyclical cost center for fast-growing platforms rather than a one-off crisis response.
Persistent cross-country failures strengthen the case for regulators to treat recommendation algorithms, not just individual posts, as the unit of election oversight — a shift from content takedowns toward systemic audits whose form remains unsettled.
The trend: Election misinformation moderation is settling into a reactive annual cycle for fast-growing platforms, with each country's vote exposing gaps before the next major election forces another round of fixes.
TikTok is becoming a primary incubator of misinformation ahead of the November midterms, including widely-viewed voter fraud conspiracy theories. The qualities that allow TikTok to fuel dance fads can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. @nytimes https://www.nytimes.com/...
I think “misinformation” is overrated as a general subject but *misinformation on a platform subject to control by the PRC government* is a special kind of case. https://twitter.com/...
Any platform that enables people to broadcast to others will have a problem with lies. It's interesting to see narrative shift from Facebook is bad for democracy to TikTok is bad for democracy. What they mean is citizen journalism is bad for democracy. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Tensions over TikTok are simmering in Washington, as lawmakers and government officials have privately grown frustrated over the Biden administration's lack of progress in policing Chinese apps that could leak data to Beijing. https://www.nytimes.com/...
“While the app appeared to fade as a political flashpoint after Mr. Trump left office last year, lawmakers and government officials have privately grown frustrated over the Biden admin's lack of progress in policing TikTok and other Chinese apps..” https://www.nytimes.com/...
TikTok has said that it plans to store all its American data solely on Oracle servers in the United States, but has not given a specific date for when this would be completed. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
US House of Reps officials sent a memo to staff members last week advising them not to use TikTok. “TikTok is a Chinese-owned company, and any use of this platform should be done with that in mind.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
The United States should treat TikTok the same way China treats Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. It should BAN it. Until it does so (and it will), everyone should boycott it! https://www.nytimes.com/...
US politicians: We Are Very Worried About TikTok. Also US politicians: Check out my ad on TikTok! Last week DNC CTO Nell Thomas told me the party had weighed the pro and cons of using the platform and decided to campaign there, because everyone's there. https://podcasts.apple.com…
TIL that despite various statements from the company for years now, ByteDance is *still* not storing Americans' TikTok data in the USA. https://www.nytimes.com/...