By Kevin Morgan, Head of Safety & Integrity, EMEA

There are now 2 million people in Ireland and 134 million people across Europe* who tune into TikTok every month, many of whom will vote in the forthcoming Irish Referendum on 8 March and the European elections on 6-9 June 2024. This week, TikTok has launched a dedicated in-app space for Irish TikTok users to learn more about the referendum, including details of how to register to vote as well as tips on how to identify election misinformation and fake news. The hub will be a pop up when you search for election terms in-app, or by clicking directly here.

Additionally, next month, ahead of the European elections, TikTok will launch a local language Election Centre in-app for each of the 27 individual EU Member States to ensure people can easily separate fact from fiction. Working with local electoral commissions and civil society organisations, these Election Centres will be a place where our community can find trusted and authoritative information.

These initiatives are part of a wider strategy to ensure that TikTok remains a creative, safe, and civil place for our community during the election period.

Enforcing our policies

We have more than 6,000 people dedicated to moderating EU language content. Our teams work alongside technology to ensure that we are consistently enforcing our rules to detect and remove misinformation, covert influence operations, and other content and behaviour that can increase during an election period.

  • Countering misinformation: In Q3 2023, 99% of all the content we removed for election and civic misinformation was taken down before it was reported to us. We have specialised misinformation moderators who are given enhanced tools and training to detect and remove violative content, as well as teams on the ground who partner with experts to ensure local context and nuance is reflected in our approach.
  • Fact-checking: We work with nine fact-checking organisations in Europe, who assess the accuracy of content in 18 different European languages, and we label any claims that cannot be verified. We are continuing to work to further expand our fact-checking network.
  • Investing in media literacy: We invest in media literacy campaigns as a counter-misinformation strategy. In 2023, we collaborated with fact checkers to launch media literacy campaigns in 18 European countries**, generating over 220m impressions and reaching approx. 50m people on TikTok. This work will continue this year, with nine additional campaigns scheduled to go live in 2024.
  • Deterring covert influence operations: Deceptive actors do sometimes try to target online platforms during elections, and we have dedicated experts working to detect, disrupt, and stay ahead of deceptive behaviours. We report the removals of covert influence networks in our quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement Reports. In the coming months, we'll also introduce dedicated covert influence operations reports to further increase transparency, accountability, and cross-industry sharing. We currently provide information about how we assess this behaviour on our Transparency Center.
  • Tackling misleading AI-generated content: AI-generated content (AIGC) brings new challenges around misinformation, which we've proactively addressed with firm rules and new technologies. We do not allow manipulated content that could be misleading, including AIGC of public figures if it depicts them endorsing a political view. We also require creators to label any realistic AIGC and recently launched a first-of-its-kind tool to help people do this. As the technology evolves, we will continue to strengthen our efforts, including by working with industry through content provenance partnerships.


Directing people to trusted information

The individual local language Election Centres build on work first started in 2021, and extensive work last year, when we launched election centres for national European elections in Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and Spain. For example, 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. We also collaborated with fact-checking organisation Nieuwscheckers during the Dutch elections to produce educational videos for users to think critically about the information they consume.

Videos related to the European elections will be labelled to direct people to the relevant Election Centre. As part of our broader election integrity efforts, we will also add reminders to hashtags to encourage people to follow our rules, verify facts, and report content they believe violates our Community Guidelines.


Tailoring our approach to accounts belonging to politicians, political parties and news outlets

TikTok is an entertainment platform defined by the diversity of our community and the content they enjoy. To that end, many European leaders, ministers, and political parties are on the platform, including approx. 30% of Members of European Parliament (MEPs). We believe that verified accounts belonging to politicians and institutions provide the electorate with another route to access their representatives, and additional trusted voices in the shared fight against misinformation.

We recognise that there is appetite for such accounts and content, and like anybody in our community, we welcome such expression as long as it does not violate our Community Guidelines. We do take a specific approach to these accounts, guided by maintaining both the integrity of the platform and safety of the people who use it. We have a long-standing policy of not allowing paid political advertising, and accounts belonging to politicians or political parties are not able to advertise or make money on TikTok.

Accounts belonging to politicians, political parties, governments and news organisations also play a unique role in civic discourse, and while we remove their violative content like we do for anyone else, we also apply more nuanced account enforcement policies to protect the public interest. For example, if such an account were to post content promoting misinformation that could undermine a civic process or contribute to real-world harm during an election period, we may restrict that account from posting content for up to 30 days, in addition to removing the content for breaking our rules.


Our work to keep TikTok safe has no finish line, and we will invest over $2bn globally this year to further strengthen our efforts. We are proud to be a co-chair of the Code of Practice on Disinformation's Working Group on elections and we will continue to partner with experts across the region, including our European Safety Advisory Council, to ensure that our approach evolves to address emerging challenges or threats.

ENDS


*Refers to EU27 countries

** Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden