By Caroline Greer, Director of Public Policy and Government Relations, Brussels

Today, we are publishing our second report under the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, sharing more than 2,600 data points across 30 European Union and European Economic Area (EEA) countries for the period from 1 January to 30 June 2023. This builds on our first baseline report from earlier this year, and provides our community with an update on the clear progress we have been making to combat the spread of harmful misinformation, alongside our industry partners.

Fostering resilience in our European community

In addition to protecting the TikTok experience by removing harmful misinformation, we continue to invest in initiatives that connect our community to authoritative information.

  • Media literacy in Eastern Europe: In the six months to June 2023, we launched media literacy campaigns in eight Eastern European countries to equip people as they engage with content related to the war on Ukraine that might contain misinformation. For example, in Poland we worked with FakeNews.pl to create a series of videos to help people learn how to critically assess the sources of content they're seeing online. The campaign generated more than 31 million impressions in Poland over two months.
  • Climate change education: In April 2023, we also launched a new search feature in Europe and around the world, that directs people looking for climate-change related content towards authoritative information that we have sourced in partnership with the United Nations. In three months, there were approximately 1.8m impressions for the search feature in Europe.
  • Investing in AI literacy: Last week, we announced the launch of a new tool to help creators label their AI-generated content and are starting to test ways to label AI-generated content automatically. This is part of our ongoing work on synthetic media, which includes a policy introduced earlier this year. We will also be proactively participating in the Generative AI subgroup to be established under the Code, recognising that this is an important and evolving area in the context of disinformation.

    • Protecting the integrity of elections in Europe

    As part of our global commitment to protect the integrity of elections, we connected our community in European countries that held elections in this reporting period with information about these important civic moments.

    • Our in-app Election Center encouraged our community in Greece to use AFP's Global Fact Check page to learn about election misinformation and debunked claims.
    • In the lead up to the Spanish Election, we worked with Newtral, our fact-checking partner, and Maldita, a fact-checking organisation and our media literacy partner, to produce educational videos about the electoral process and election misinformation.
    • For the Finnish elections, we launched a search guide to provide users with up to date information, and partnered with the National Audiovisual Institute to direct people to their Media Literacy website.

    We also brought in independent regional experts to brief our teams on these countries' local and political landscapes and how they might influence online behaviours. We will consider the lessons we have learned during these election cycles as we prepare to support the community through the upcoming European Parliament elections. We're proud to also be co-chairing the Code's recently formed Working Group on Elections.

    Strengthening enforcement through fact-checking partnerships

    Globally, we work with 15 fact-checking organisations accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, covering more than 50 languages, who help us apply our firm rules against misinformation in a fair and a responsible way by assessing the accuracy of potentially misleading claims, which our moderation teams can then enforce.

    In Europe, we're proud to report that in the first six months of this year, we've expanded our fact-checking programmes in nine more EU and EEA countries, exceeding our commitment to add coverage for four more EEA countries. This expansion has helped strengthen our enforcement against misinformation over the last six months.

    Our commitment to transparency

    The Code of Practice on Disinformation continues to bring together the industry as we work toward a shared goal of limiting the spread of harmful misinformation and building more resilient online communities. We will continue to prioritise safety so that our community - in Europe and around the world - can continue to have creative and joyful TikTok experiences.

    To view our COPD report in full, see here.