Oct. 21 (UPI) -- Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at NYU said Friday that Chinese-owned Tik Tok approved 90% of disinformation ads in tests, demonstrating the continuing threat to democracy posed by widespread social media disinformation.
The two groups said Tik Tok was the worst-performing social media platform examined, approving 90% of the test ads containing outright false and misleading election misinformation. Facebook was only partially effective, while YouTube was effective in both detecting the misinformation ads and suspending the channel carrying them.
"For years we have seen key democratic processes undermined by disinformation, lies and hate being spread on social media platforms -- the companies themselves even claim to recognize the problem," said Global Witness Senior Advisor Jon Lloyd in a statement. "But this research shows they are still simply not doing enough to stop threats to democracy surfacing on their platforms."
In the experiment testing how well social media platforms are living up to pledges to stop disinformation, 20 ads targeted to political battleground states Arizona, Colorado and Georgia were posted in English and in Spanish.
Related
While Tik Tok has explicitly banned political ads, the platform approved test ads "stating voting days would be extended, votes in primaries would automatically be counted in the midterms, and that social media accounts can be used as voter verification," the report found.
Pew Research Center says a survey conducted on July 18-Aug. 21 shows more Americans are getting their news from TikTok.
Roughly a quarter of Americans under 30 regularly get news from TikTok, according to the poll. The overall share of U.S. adults getting their news from TikTok is small -- 10%. But that is triple the number it was two years ago.
"So much of the public conversation about elections happens now on Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Disinformation has a major impact on our elections, core to our democratic system," said Laura Edleson, co-director of the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy team, said in a statement.
Edelson called on TikTok and Facebook to do better and to stop bad information about elections before it gets to voters. She said YouTube's performance demonstrates that detecting and removing disinformation isn't impossible.
Meanwhile, TikTok denied Friday that it used location data in the app to track Americans. A Forbes article published Thursday said TikTok planned to monitor the personal location of specific American citizens.
TikTok tweeted Thursday that it does not collect precise GPS location information on U.S. users, so it was unable to monitor American as the Forbes article alleged.
According to Forbes, the monitoring was planned by Chinese-owned TikTok parent company Bytedance. But it's unclear whether any data was actually collected.
