REUTERS: According to a new analysis from a think tank, a TikTok feature that allows users to add another person’s audio to their videos is being used to spread inaccurate and damaging content about COVID-19 vaccines. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, located in London, studied 124 films that repurposed speech from four original TikTok videos, two of which were banned by the company for violating its COVID disinformation rules, to spread misinformation and create anxieties about vaccine side effects. More than 20 million people watched the 124 videos.
“There’s still a portion of the stuff that can move,” Ciaran O’Connor, an expert with the counter-extremism research group, said. He compared the propagation of misinformation via TikTok’s “Sounds” feature to the widespread use of WhatsApp audio messaging during the pandemic. TikTok is known for its viral trends, in which users make their own films by riffing on the same song or voice clip. The popular social video site, which exploded in popularity during the pandemic, said it examines the audio of rule-breaking films and may restrict other users from using them as Sounds. It claimed that human content moderation faults were at blame for these incidents. Sounds can also be reported through the app, according to the description. ISD discovered that audio from one video of a user claiming that the COVID vaccine’s rapid development rendered it hazardous and making false parallels to other illnesses was utilized in over 4,500 videos. TikTok claimed it had previously limited the circulation of videos using this Sound rather than fully removing it because it was only thought to be possibly deceptive. Despite this, the top 25 videos on this Sound’s TikTok page have been seen a total of 16.7 million times.
Many of the films, according to ISD, used sound to show support for the declaration. After evaluating the report’s results, TikTok stated it removed some of the videos that used the Sound and made the Sound more difficult to discover in searches. It also got rid of the three additional Sounds that were mentioned in the report. According to a TikTok spokeswoman, “we seek to foster a genuine TikTok experience by preventing the distribution of incorrect content, including audio, and pushing authoritative information regarding COVID-19 and vaccines across our platform.” Only two of the 124 videos contained labels linking to authoritative COVID information, according to ISD. The reason for this, according to the business, is that labels were only applied to films with certain hashtags. Last week, TikTok announced modifications to its content-moderation procedures for some categories, including nudity and violent or graphic material, moving to fully automated reviewing methods. (Elizabeth Culliford contributed reporting, and Stephen Coates edited the piece.)/n
