The social network intends to pay particular attention to the remunerated political content published by influencers.
Le Monde with reuters
Tiktok announced, Wednesday, August 17, measures to prevent video producers from publishing on the application of remunerated political messages, in anticipation of the US mid-term elections to be held on November 8. The details were communicated In a blog post signed by Eric Han , manager at Tiktok for the security of this social network in the United States.
In theory, the purchase of political advertisements has already been prohibited since 2019 on the Chinese social network. But during the American presidential election of 2020, some campaign teams circumvented the ban by paying influencers. “Tiktok does not allow political advertisements, and this includes the contents for which influencers are paid,” said Eric Han in his press release. The company therefore intends to fill this flaw by strengthening controls and by organizing information sessions with creators and talent agencies to remind them of the rules of use of the social network.
Eric Han added that internal teams will monitor the signs showing that creators are paid to publish political content, and that the company will also rely on media and partners to find messages in violation and for delete them. All other political videos, as soon as they are not remunerated, do not propagate disinformation and respect the rules of use of the application, are intended to remain in the wire of users.
Partnership with Fact-Checking organizations 2>
Tiktok also launches a specific area in the application called “Elections Center”, which will bring together useful information to Internet users concerning polling stations, candidates and the election in general. “Tiktok has passed partnerships with recognized organizations from Fact-Checking to help assess the veracity of content published in more than 30 languages,” adds Eric Han. During a telephone appointment with the press, the latter mentioned Politifact, Science Feedback and Lead Stories among these partners, reports the news agency Bloomberg.
Tiktok published these new measures after similar updates from Meta and Twitter. Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, said Tuesday Set up a procedure based on the same principles as that adopted in 2020 , and will prevent political advertisers from disseminating new publications a week before the election. At the time, these procedures had not made it possible to completely stem the flood of false information which had spread at the time of the announcement of the results, nor to prevent the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Last week, Twitter also expressed of its moderation policy upstream of the mid-term elections . The social network plans to place labels again in front of certain misleading tweets as well as to insert reliable information in the sons of users.