TikTok Bans AI-Made Candidate Images, Promises to Deter Election Misinformation

The Wrap
TikTok last month joined the growing number of tech companies promising to protect “election integrity” this year as the U.S. and dozens of other countries go to the polls.

“Over the last 4 years, we’ve worked to protect our platform through over 150 elections around the world,” said a post by Suzy Loftus, the company’s head of USDS Trust and Safety. “Today, we’re sharing an overview of our continued investment to ensure that TikTok continues to be a creative, safe, and civil place for our community in a historic elections year.”

The app, owned by China-based ByteDance, has about 2 billion users worldwide and roughly 150 million active users in the U.S.

TikTok requires government, candidate and political party accounts to be verified, and said it labels content its factcheckers find “unsubstantiated.” But such content could be the app’s thorniest problem.

While it says that it has “thousands of trust and safety professionals” working to enforce community guidelines, election observers express mounting concern that apps like TikTok will spread misinformation about the presidential race, congressional and Senate elections and gubernatorial contests across the country faster than the company’s “specialized misinformation moderators” can shut them down. MORE