TikTokTikTok has launched a dedicated in-app General Election Centre to provide our tens of millions of UK users with reliable and authoritative information as the country prepares to go to the polls.
We've partnered with Logically Facts, our fact-checking partner, to provide media literacy tips alongside key election and voting information from the Electoral Commission.
When on TikTok, people will be directed to the General Election Centre through prompts and labels on relevant election content and when making election-related searches. We took a similar approach during the recent Local Elections in England and Wales, and we were pleased to connect hundreds of thousands of users to our Local Election Centre.
Following the announcement of the snap election, we moved swiftly to provide our community with reliable information, with TikTok being the first major platform to launch a dedicated UK General Election Centre.
Political content
TikTok is an entertainment platform. The content on our platform is driven by and for our community, and so reflects our society. We want TikTok to be a place where people can share their views and ideas on any topic that is important to society, including politics and elections. But we want to make sure that TikTok is a safe space for those discussions and one that remains, at its core, entertaining.
In order to achieve this, we have a number of rules that apply to government, politician, and political party accounts. TikTok has a long-standing policy of not allowing paid political advertising on our platform, nor allowing accounts belonging to governments, politicians or political parties to fundraise or monetise.
However, we believe that verified accounts belonging to politicians and political institutions provide the electorate with another route to access their representatives. We encourage such accounts to get verified.
Recently, we have seen @uklabour, @ukconservatives and @libdems join our platform. They join the longer-standing accounts of @reformparty_uk, @thegreenparty, @plaidcymru, @theSNP and @womensequalityparty.
Heading into this election, around a hundred Members of Parliament already had TikTok accounts, with Labour's Zarah Sultana and Conservative's Dr. Luke Evans amongst some of the most popular.
UK news organisations are also reaching new audiences through our platform. The Daily Mail now has over 10 million followers across its TikTok channels, Sky News has 5.9 million, the BBC has 5.8 million across its news accounts, while ITV News has 3 million and The Sun, 2 million.
We also recognise that accounts belonging to news organisations, politicians, political parties and governments play a unique role in civic discourse, and apply more nuanced account enforcement policies to protect the public interest, which we explain in our Community Guidelines.
AI-generated content
TikTok has been a leader in introducing measures to encourage responsible practices around AI-generated content (AIGC). We were recently the first video sharing platform to implement Content Credentials technology, from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which automatically labels AI-generated content when it's uploaded from certain other platforms.
We do not allow manipulated content that could be misleading on our platform, including AIGC of public figures if it depicts them endorsing a political view. We also require creators to label any realistic AIGC and launched a first-of-its-kind tool to help people do this last year.
Earlier this year, we were also a founding signatory to the cross-industry Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections at the Munich Security Conference.
How we moderate content and accounts during elections
Thousands of trust and safety professionals work alongside technology to enforce our Community Guidelines. We are committed to consistently enforcing our rules to fight misinformation, covert influence operations, and other content and behaviour that platforms see more of during elections. In the run up to polling day, our Trust and Safety team will also be establishing a dedicated 'Mission Control' for the election.
In addition to our tailored approach to political and news accounts and tackling misleading AIGC, highlighted above, we're also:
- Countering misinformation: In Q4 2023, 99% of all the content we removed for election and civic misinformation was taken down before it was reported to us. We invest in media literacy as a counter-misinformation strategy as well as technology and people to fight misinformation at scale. This includes specialised misinformation moderators with enhanced tools and training, and teams on the ground who partner with experts to prioritise local context and nuance. In the UK, we partner with Logically for our fact-checking programme.
- Deterring covert influence operations: We know that deceptive actors try to target online platforms during elections, and we remain vigilant against covert influence operations. We have dedicated experts working to detect, disrupt, and stay ahead of deceptive behaviours. We recently introduced dedicated covert influence operations reports to further increase transparency, accountability, and sharing with the industry. We provide information about how we assess this behaviour at our Transparency Centre.
