- Have you heard of Andrew Yang?
- Bernie is spot on.
- Trump 2020.
- [Narrator] TikTok,
the increasingly popular
social media app, has been
getting more and more political.
- [Male Voice] I love Trump.
- [Narrator] The platform's
young users are taking to TikTok
to express their political views,
promote their favorite candidates,
and even react to political news.
But with 24 million
active users in the US,
experts are warning that
the platform could be used
to spread misinformation
ahead of the 2020 election.
- TikTok is just a platform.
It looks like a fun video platform,
but it is a platform for speech.
And so that speech is
gonna take many forms.
Video is hard to moderate
because it's just a lot of information.
It's not one picture, it's
not one thing of text,
it's visual, and it's audio,
and all of that is just really,
really difficult and time-consuming
and requires a lot of human labor.
- So, how exactly does TikTok work?
The social network makes it extremely easy
to create and share,
so called video memes.
Well, all you gotta do is,
pick an effect, record a video,
add some music and some text, wallah,
your TikTok is out in the world.
- [Narrator] TikTok is known
for its carefree and catchy content.
And the company says,
its mission is to inspire
creativity and bring joy.
But some users say they've
noticed that political videos
get more attention than
non-political videos.
Like this Trump dance post,
which got more than half a million views.
♪ I'mma vote Trump 2020 ♪
♪ Trump 2020 ♪
- From my Trump video,
it did start a lot of
(laughs) argument or debate.
- [Narrator] Many users
say they're drawn to TikTok
because it's easy to
gain a large following,
and content spreads rapidly.
- You can post one video and
instantly overnight be viral.
- It's given an insane and
kinda unexpected opportunity
to a lot of young people to
kind of express their opinions.
- Because TikTok videos
can easily go viral,
there's also the risk
that users will wittingly
or unwittingly share
information that's false.
And once it spreads, it can
be really difficult to stop.
For example, after President
Trump was impeached
by the House of Representatives,
some users posted a false claim.
They shared videos saying,
the Constitution states a
president impeached by the House
but not convicted by the Senate,
is eligible to run for
office two more times.
But that paragraph in the video,
actually comes from the
fact-checking website, Snopes,
which rates the claim as false.
The video which had tens
of thousands of views,
was removed by TikTok
after The Wall Street
Journal asked about it.
And in a statement,
TikTok said it does not
permit misinformation
that could cause harm to our
community or the larger public.
While this type of content
is less common on TikTok
than on other platforms,
we take the issue seriously
and remove deliberate attempts
to misrepresent authoritative
sources of news.
But other videos, are less clear-cut.
For example, when the
hashtag world war three
gained popularity after the US took out
Iranian general Qasem Soleimani,
many users posted videos about the draft,
which hasn't been active
for nearly four decades.
While TikTok doesn't allow misinformation,
it makes exceptions for satire and humor,
which is why so many of
those videos remain online.
- Of course, there's not
yet a draft and so like the,
they are kind of over the
top teenager videos of them,
saying that they don't wanna be drafted,
or afraid of being drafted
or kind of reacting to it.
Is that them being political?
Is that them joking?
Or is that them being really serious?
It's really hard to tell.
- In 2016, misinformation and
disinformation were spread
on various social media
platforms, in various ways,
including in memes that
appeared to be innocent.
There's no evidence
that coordinated misinformation campaigns
are infiltrating TikTok,
and the company says
it remains vigilant.
But with the 2020 race picking up steam,
and millions of TikTok
videos being uploaded
with political hashtags,
experts warn that identifying
and flagging problematic content
could be a challenge for
the relatively new platform.
- TikTok's at the very
nascent stages of doing this,
and I think they have
their work cut out for them
because they just might not
have the sheer number of people,
let alone the rules in place
to kind of attack this information.
