TikTok Is Being Sucked By The Violence And Misinformation Of The Ukrainian War

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Another TikTok feature that is very popular allows people to reuse audio. This has allowed people to make lip-syncing scenes from popular songs and movies. However, audio can be misunderstood or taken out of context.

According to The Times’s review, audio from a 2020 explosion that occurred in Beirut (Lebanon) was uploaded to TikTok videos over the past week. The videos claimed to show current-day Ukraine. Another example is a soundtrack of gunfire, which was uploaded to TikTok Feb. 1, before Russia invaded, and later used in more than 1,700 videos, according to Ms. Richards.

Because TikTok is a global platform, it can be difficult to remove such content. After a video has been uploaded, it can be recorded again and then translated into many other languages. Videos that aren’t reported by users need to be found independently by content moderators who are fluent in the respective languages before they can be removed.

Alex Stamos, who is also the director of Stanford Internet Observatory and was previously the head of security at Facebook, stated that video is the most difficult format to moderate on all platforms. This, combined with the fact TikTok’s algorithm being the primary factor in what content a user views, rather than friendships or followings on big U.S. platforms makes TikTok an extremely powerful platform for viral propaganda.

Dafne Atapan, a 23-year-old Turkish national living in San Francisco Bay Area, stated that she knew she had to check the factual accuracy of TikTok videos about the war. She stated that she noticed many videos were edited from news reports, or commentary by people in the United States watching the events in Ukraine from afar.

She said that she feels like the videos she’s been seeing lately are intended to get her riled up or emotionally manipulate her. “I worry so much now that I sometimes find myself going online to check the comments and see if it’s true before I believe it.”

Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles, stated that she was shocked to hear from a Times reporter about how some TikTok videos about the war were misleading, unreliable, and she was disappointed.

She said, “I guess that I don’t really understand what war looks like.” “But we go TikTok for everything so it makes sense that we would trust it regarding this.”

Ms. Hernandez said that TikTok was her favorite platform for news. She said that most of the information she sees on the app is real.