TikTokby Peachy Paderna, Public Policy Manager, Philippines, TikTok
We're sharing an overview of our work to ensure that TikTok continues to be a creative, safe, and civil place for our Philippine community, especially during the Philippine Midterm Election.
Elections are important moments of community conversation. During these civic processes, we remain focused on keeping people safe and protecting the integrity of the TikTok platform. We do this by enforcing a set of robust policies aimed at preventing the spread of misinformation, launching an election center, prohibiting political ads, elevating authoritative information from trusted sources, and collaborating with experts who help us evaluate and improve our approach.
Combating Misinformation
As we share in our community guidelines, we protect the integrity of elections by removing harmful misinformation about civic and electoral processes, hateful content, and other content that breaks our rules. We also reduce the reach of claims that can't be verified.
- Misinformation: We do not allow misinformation about civic and electoral processes, regardless of intent. We detect and take action against this content by using a combination of technology and human moderators, and by working with International Fact-Checking Network-accredited fact-checking organizations who are part of our Global Fact-Checking Program to assess the accuracy of content. Moderating online misinformation is complex and nuanced, which is why we have specialized misinformation moderators with enhanced training and access to tools like our global database of previously fact-checked claims. During elections, information can rapidly evolve based on real-world events, and sometimes it may not be clear whether a claim is true or false. When content is unverified, we may label it, reduce its reach by making it ineligible for For You feeds, and prompt people to reconsider sharing it until there’s more information.
- CIO: During elections, bad actors may seek to use deceptive behaviors in an effort to affect an election outcome or process. We remain vigilant against these actors and activities by taking action to remove covert influence operations. These include attempts to influence or sway public opinion while misleading people or our platform’s systems about the identity, origin, operating location, popularity, or purpose of an account. Learn more about how we counter influence operations here.
- Artificial Intelligence: We don't allow manipulated content that could be misleading, including AI-generated content (AIGC) of public figures if it depicts them endorsing a political view. We define a public figure as an adult with a significant public role, such as a government official or politician. We require creators to label any realistic AIGC and launched a first-of-its-kind tool to help people do this. We continue to improve our policies and detection as the technology evolves while partnering with experts on media literacy content for our community. Learn more about our approach here.
- Hate: We do not allow violent and hateful organizations or individuals on our platform, and prohibit incitement to violence, hateful behavior, hate speech, and hateful ideologies.
Building community resilience against election misinformation
We help people get information from trusted sources so that they can separate fact from fiction
We believe it’s important to build resilience against misinformation among the communities that we serve. In the lead up to elections, we work with fact-checking organizations, electoral commissions, and civil society to create local election information resources that provide our community access to authoritative information about the election:
- We launched our Philippine Elections Center in partnership with the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC), the National Citizens' Movement For Free Elections (NAMFREL), and the Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE) to connect Filipinos to trustworthy and reliable information about voting. We will direct people to this Elections Center through prompts on relevant election content and searches.
Election Center
- We launched our #ThinkTwice Digital Literacy Campaign to encourage our Filipino community to think critically about the content they’re creating and sharing and to remind them that they can play their part in keeping the community safe and positive by reporting content to us through our easy-to-use in-app reporting feature. To date, our hero video has gained almost a million views.
Prohibiting paid promotion of political content
To promote an inclusive and creative platform, we ban paid political ads and don't allow accounts belonging to politicians, governments or political parties to make money on TikTok.
We’ve long prohibited paid promotion of political content on TikTok. This is because we don’t believe that this kind of advertising is conducive to the inclusive, authentic and creative experience we strive to provide for our community. Specifically, we don’t allow paid political promotion, political advertising, or fundraising by politicians and political parties, including both traditional paid ads or creators receiving compensation to support or oppose a candidate for office. Accounts belonging to politicians and political parties do not have access to advertising features, and neither these accounts nor accounts belonging to governments have access to our monetization features, such as gifting or tipping.
Partnering with experts
We partner with experts so that we can counter emerging threats and help maintain the integrity of elections around the world.
We partner with experts so that we can counter emerging threats and help maintain the integrity of elections around the world. Our global election integrity team is staffed by multi-disciplinary experts in democracy, elections, civil society, and technology who bring a wealth of policy, technical, and local expertise to our preparedness efforts. During elections, they work tirelessly to stay ahead of evolving threats.
- We continue to expand and invest in our Election Integrity team, which is tasked with identifying and responding to risks posed by upcoming elections based on current and historic factors.
- We collaborate with experts and organizations across all the countries we operate in to help us promote safety and prevent harm and misuse on TikTok. In the Philippines, we are conducting sessions with the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), civil society organizations, creators, election watch dogs, and industry experts to help inform our election policies.
COMELEC and TikTok
