TikTok accused of failing to tackle election disinformation in Ireland

The Chinese-owned platform is under increasing scrutiny in Europe for its influence over electoral processes.

Transcript

00:00Is TikTok approving election disinformation in Ireland?

00:09TikTok is under scrutiny again in Europe for election-related disinformation, this time

00:14in Ireland. International NGO Global Witness developed 14 TikTok videos with disinformation

00:21about the Irish election in both English and Irish. They were submitted to TikTok to be

00:27approved as paid ads. Three of the 14 were approved in English and eight in Irish, despite

00:33the content of the posts violating the platform's community guidelines and threatening the integrity

00:39of the election. Global Witness removed the ads before they could go live on the platform,

00:44but the ads approved by TikTok claim that proof of two COVID-19 vaccinations was needed

00:51to vote, postal votes would happen after election day and that votes could be cast

00:57on Facebook. We asked TikTok about Global Witness's investigation and the spokesperson

01:04said, none of these ads ever appeared on TikTok and the majority were correctly rejected at

01:10the first stage of moderation. We will continue to enforce our longstanding position that

01:15we do not allow political advertising on TikTok and have launched a dedicated in-app election

01:21centre to provide our users with authoritative information about the elections. The platform

01:27claims that the probe didn't fairly test their safeguards as it didn't go through all stages

01:32of moderation and because special symbols and characters were used to evade automated

01:37moderation. Global Witness says the probe clearly shows significant failings in TikTok's

01:42efforts to detect election disinformation.