TikTok to introduce warnings on content to help tackle misinformation

TikTok is to feature banner warnings on suspect content in a bid to dissuade users from sharing videos featuring misinformation.

Its new tool, which will launch in the UK on 22 February, is one of the first from a major social platform to target not just content that has been shown to be false, but also that has not, or cannot, be conclusively proved to be true.

“Sometimes fact-checks are inconclusive or content is not able to be confirmed, especially during unfolding events,” said Gina Hernandez, a product manager with TikTok’s trust and safety team. “In these cases, a video may become ineligible for recommendation into anyone’s For You feed to limit the spread of potentially misleading information.

“Today, we’re taking that a step further to inform viewers when we identify a video with unsubstantiated content in an effort to reduce sharing.”

Users who are watching such videos will see a banner near the top of the video if the content has already been reviewed by TikTok’s fact-checking partner Logically and not validated. If they try to share it, they will see a further warning that the video has been flagged as “unverified”.

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“When we tested this approach, we saw viewers decrease the rate at which they shared videos by 24%, while likes on such unsubstantiated content also decreased by 7%,” Hernandez added.

The ability to mark posts as unverified could help limit the spread of claims which, while baseless, are hard to conclusively prove false. According to fact-checking groups, the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic were particularly rife with such claims, since there was almost no conclusive data about the disease, making it hard to find authoritative sources to dismiss appealing-sounding statements such as “Covid doesn’t spread as well in warm homes”.

Fact-checkers who work on Facebook, the social network with the longest-running third-party fact-checking program, have a number of options beyond simply “true” and “false”. Posts can also be flagged as “altered”, “partly false”, “missing context” or “satire”. But unlike TikTok, the social network does not penalise posts for the absence of a “true” verification, except in certain situations where a post is highly viral and fact-checkers are actively working on uncovering the truth.