The NewsGuard investigation found that for a sampling of searches on prominent news topics, almost 20 percent of the videos presented as search results contained misinformation. This means that for searches on topics ranging from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to school shootings and COVID vaccines, TikTok’s users are consistently fed false and misleading claims.
"Left – old school weather forecast, happy and sunshiny. Right – new style weather forecast, Designed to look like fear and destruction. It’s called summer."
This document aims to provide teachers with some general
guidance on how schools might approach disinformation and
conspiracy theories amongst pupils.
A manipulated video showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a conference call with Elon Musk is circulating online. The footage has been digitally altered to include white powder, which some social media users have said is cocaine on his desk.
RUSSIA’S INVASION OF Ukraine is not the first social media war—but it is the first to play out on TikTok. The 2011 Arab Spring was fomented and furthered on Twitter and Facebook. Clips of Syrian children choking from chemical weapons filled social media timelines in 2018. And the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, with all the chaos that wrought, was live-tweeted into our homes last year. Images of unspeakable horrors supplanting the banality of status updates and selfies is nothing new. But the current conflict is a very different kind of social media war, fueled by TikTok’s transformative effect on the old norms of tech.
TikTok is feeding false and misleading content about the war in Ukraine to users within 40 minutes of their signing up to the app, regardless of whether they run any searches on the platform, an investigation by NewsGuard has found.
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