Articles
Tiktok to crack down on paid political posts from influencers ahead of US elections
by Sara Floyd HelloThe company informed on Wednesday that TikTok will work to prevent content creators from publishing paid political messages on the short-form video app, as part of its preparation for the midterm election in November.
Critics and lawmakers accuse TikTok and rival social media companies including Meta Platforms and Twitter of not doing much to prevent political disinformation and divisive content from spreading on their apps.
While the platform has banned paid political ads since 2019, campaign strategists have avoided the ban by paying influencers to promote political issues.
The company seeks to close the gap by holding meetings with creators and talent agencies to remind them that posting paid political content is against TikTok’s policies, said Eric Han who is the TikTok’s head of security in the United States.
The internal teams added by him, including those working on trust and safety, will monitor for signs that creators are being paid to post political content, and to find content that violates the rules the company will also rely on media reports and external partners.
Han said, We saw this as an issue in 2020. We will remove it from our platform as soon as we find out. Tiktok broadcast its plan after similar announcements from Meta and Twitter.
Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it will stop political advertisers from running new ads a week before the election, an action it also took in 2020. They found that both Twitter and Facebook consistently applied labels to only about 70% of the claims.
Twitter said in a statement that it has taken lots of steps in recent months to “elevate reliable resources” about voting and primaries processes. Besides, during the midterms Twitter’s efforts to fight misinformation that will include information prompts to debunk falsehoods before they spread widely online.
Moreover, more emphasis should be placed on removing false and misleading posts said by Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at nonpartisan group Common Cause. He said that pointing them to other sources is not enough.
According to Feeney’s statement “Twitter has an ability and responsibility to stop misinformation at the source”. He also said that world leaders and politicians should face a higher standard for what they tweet.
Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School who studies online speech regulation said that Twitter leads the industry in releasing data on how its efforts to intervene against misinformation are working. She said, yet more than a year after soliciting the public on what the company should do when a world leader violates its rules, till now Twitter has not provided an update.
Last week, Twitter said it planned to repeat previous methods for the US election, including placing labels in front of some misleading tweets and inserting reliable information into timelines to debunk lies before they spread online. Civil and voting rights experts said that the plan was not adequate to prepare for the election.
On 8 November the midterm elections will be held. For election all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 seats in the 100-member Senate and the governorships in 36 states are up.
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About Sara Floyd 
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83 connections, 2 recommendations, 250 honor points.Joined APSense since, June 22nd, 2022, From New Jersey, United States.
Created on Aug 19th 2022 13:06. Viewed 194 times.
