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

Millions of Europeans on TikTok will start to receive push notifications from next month to direct them to their local in-app Election Centre where they can find trusted and authoritative information about the upcoming EU Parliament elections and media literacy tips.

These Centres, which we announced last month, have been created in partnership with local electoral commissions and civil society organisations, and will be available in the local language for each of the 27 EU Member States. Helping people separate fact from fiction is an important pillar of our strategy to combat misinformation online and protect the integrity of elections.

The initiative comes as we roll out additional local media literacy programmes in each of the 27 EU Member States too, as detailed in our third report under the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, which we published today and includes a dedicated section on our election integrity efforts.

We worked with local media literacy bodies and trusted fact-checking partners to run 11 media literacy campaigns between July and December 2023. In total, we ran 18 campaigns during 2023, which generated more than 220m impressions and reached approximately 50m people on TikTok.

A further nine such campaigns are scheduled for 2024. By the end of this year, our communities in every one of the 27 EU Member States will have access to localised educational videos from our partners and local creators about how to be vigilant against misinformation.

In addition to these campaigns, during this reporting period under the Code, we've continued to protect the integrity of our platform as a number of European countries held national elections.

  • Newtral, our fact-checking partner, and Maldita, a Spanish fact-checking and media literacy organisation, helped us create educational videos on media literacy and how to be source critical, which we embedded in our Spanish Elections Centre.
  • We partnered with DigiQ to develop our media literacy strategy, and created an in-app Slovak Election Centre, which redirected users to authoritative information on DigiQ's website.
  • Working with our new fact-checking partner Demagog and FakeNews.pl, we provided our Polish community with official voting information through an in-app Polish Election Centre, including educational videos.
  • Together with Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), our fact-checking partner, and Nieuwscheckers, a fact-checking initiative of the Journalism and New Media Course at Leiden University, we provided people with up-to-date information in our in-app Dutch Election Centre.

Expanding fact-checking partnerships in Europe

We continue to invest in our global fact-checking programme, which includes 18 fact-checking organisations accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, covering more than 50 languages.

During this reporting period, we expanded fact-checking coverage in Europe by onboarding two new partners, Demagog and Poligrafo, bringing our total to 11 partners who provide coverage in 18 official EU languages.

Ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections, we will have fact-checking coverage covering at least one official language for each of the 27 European Member States through a combination of permanent and temporary partnerships.

Our commitment to transparency

We're proud to provide updates on the strong efforts and progress we are making in combating harmful misinformation and building community resilience against misinformation. This latest report under the Code shares more than 3200 data points across 30 European Union and European Economic Area (EEA) countries for the period from 1 July to 31 December 2023 - an increase of more than 500 data points on our previous report. As co-chair of the Code's Working Group on Elections, we also recognise the important role that the Code continues to play in bringing the industry together, especially as we approach these EU Parliament elections.