Many have called the invasion of Ukraine the world’s first “TikTok war”, and experts say it is high time for the short video platform – known primarily for its silly lip sync and dance challenge – to should be taken seriously.
Some politicians are doing the same. In a speech, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appealed to “TikTokers” as a group that could help end the war. Last week, Joe Biden spoke to dozens of top users on the app in a first-of-its-kind meeting to brief influencers on the conflict in Ukraine and how the US is addressing it.
But as world leaders continue to legitimize the platform, others continue to dismiss it as frivolous. The White House meeting was featured in a skit on Saturday Night Live, and relentlessly ridiculed on Twitter, while Republican Senator Josh Hawley scolded Biden To tell “teenagers to do their jobs”.
Experts say this mindset is a mistake.
“TikTok is constantly overlooked and denied by people who don’t take the time to understand it,” said Abby Richards, an independent researcher who studied the app. “Many of the problems we see with it today stem from the false idea that it’s just a dancing app.”
‘Structurally incompatible’ with the needs of the times
Ukraine-related content has exploded on TikTok since the country was invaded on February 24, with videos tagged #Ukraine surpassing 30.5bn views as of March 17th. A New York Times report found that, proportionately, Ukraine’s content on TikTok surpasses that on platforms more than twice its size.
With that dramatic increase came an influx of misinformation and propaganda. Videos of unrelated explosions were re-posted as if they were from Ukraine. Uploaded media from video games circulated as footage of real-life events. The Russian propaganda went viral even before it was removed.
Richards said, “We saw immediately from the start of the conflict that TikTok was structurally inconsistent with the needs of the present moment with respect to dismantling.”
Best video.
It seems that the Russian government is bribing/strengthening several Russian TikTok influencers to put the government line on Ukraine – with similar scripts.
This girl calls them out and says that the influencer’s own audience is making fun of her for this. I pic.twitter.com/ZqNTAWBn8b
— mike galsworthy (@mikegalsworthy) 5 March 2022
According to a paper published by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, TikTok has several features that make it uniquely susceptible to such issues as TikTok, the War on Ukraine, and 10 features that make the app vulnerable to misinformation. .
The paper said its main features are for remixing media, allowing users to upload video and sound clips without attributing their originals., Which makes it difficult to make videos relevant and fact check. This has created a digital environment in which “it is difficult – even for seasoned journalists and researchers – to identify truth from rumours, parodies and concoctions”, the researchers said.
Researchers say the design features within the app also make it an easy route for misinformation. Users mostly post under pseudonyms; The upload date for videos is not prominently displayed, complicating efforts to make content relevant; And the newsfeed structure – with each video occupying the user’s entire screen – makes it difficult to seek additional sources.
This TikTok video, which claims to show battle scenes on the streets of Kyiv, has garnered 9 million views. This is an old clip of the Independence Day military parade in the city. pic.twitter.com/ePn1pDf83x
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@shayan86) 9 March 2022
Unlike Facebook, where the user’s feed is primarily populated As with content from friends and people they know, TikTok’s “page for you” is largely content from strangers Determined by the company’s opaque algorithm.
And the more a platform relies on algorithms rather than chronological newsfeeds, the more susceptible it can be to misinformation and disinformation, experts say. This is because algorithms favor content that gets more engagement.
Mark Fadoula, a researcher at the TikTok Observatory, said, “One thing that all platforms have in common is that algorithms are optimized to detect and exploit cognitive biases for more polarizing content, depending on where they are on the platform. and study its content policies.” “Propaganda is very attractive to users, so it’s more likely to appear on feed.”
These issues are further exacerbated by the age and size of TikTok. The app is relatively young, having launched in 2016, and has rapidly grown to over 130m in the United States and over 1bn globally. Although smaller than Facebook, which has 230 million users in the US and 2.9 billion globally, the platform faces similar issues with fewer resources and less experience.
A co-author of the paper, Emily Dreyfus, a researcher at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, said that TikTok continues to grow after the number of users increased during the 2020 pandemic-induced lockdown.
“That’s when we really started seeing a shift from the idea of people doing viral dance tricks for teens to a real part of the cultural conversation,” she said.
tiktok takes action
Like many other social media companies, TikTok has scrambled to keep up with an onslaught of propaganda about the war in Ukraine.
It uses a combination of algorithms and human moderators to manage the platform, spokesman Jamie Fawaza told the Guardian, with teams that speak more than 60 languages and dialects, including Russian and Ukrainian. It has introduced a state-controlled media policy to address propaganda perpetrated by Russian entities.
“We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased security and security resources to detect emerging threats and address harmful misinformation,” Favaza said.
1/ We encourage our community to think carefully about the content posted online. Here are some digital literacy tools to help you evaluate and respond to information, as well as provide forever safety tips #bcybersmart I pic.twitter.com/jvWWNVNZcK
— tiktokcomms (@TikTokComms) 18 March 2022
Meanwhile TikTok added digital literacy tips to its Discover page “to help our community evaluate and decide on the content they see online”. It has voluntarily issued transparency reports over the years about what content it has removed.
But researchers say much more remains to be done. Despite these moves, some state-controlled media accounts such as RT remain on the app, although access to them is banned in the European Union.
TikTok researcher Richards noted that the disinformation campaign he studied for a recent report remains on the platform, with dozens of videos using the caption “Russian Lives Matter” being viewed thousands of times.
influencers’ power
In many ways, TikTok has been more vulnerable to criticism than its predecessors, including from social media giants such as Facebook. But while the company is dutifully flagging misinformation and cracking down on Russian state material, reining in massive propaganda is becoming more complicated than ever as the power of influencers grows.
Well-followed accounts have a huge impact on the media their followers consume, regardless of how much expertise they actually have in a given topic. Studies show that consumers are significantly more likely to trust someone’s recommendation on social media than on traditional advertising, and the same goes for information shared online.
Of course it is the “best way to donate to Ukraine” video that gets shaded
General Tip: Donate to local Ukrainian trusted organizations that will use your money quickly and efficiently, huge donations take a lot of time and have big deductions, so beware of those! pic.twitter.com/xouSH99Nra
— Xena (@xenasolo) 5 March 2022
The Schorenstein Center paper argued that TikTok is “driven by a culture that values individual creators and platform-specific microcelebrities”, making influencers and large followers particularly vulnerable to unintentionally sharing false or manipulated content. are susceptible to.
“Influencers have great incentive to enter discourse about a breaking news event or ongoing crisis, as these posts can boost users’ profiles; Even a viral video can make an entire account popular.
Meanwhile, very few checks and balances exist in terms of how they operate in the online media space, Dreyfus said, noting that they work in the same media space as journalists with little training or media literacy, As with how to factcheck false claims, even seasoned researchers struggle to figure it out.
“There is no formal accountability for influencers and they often do what their fans want,” Dreyfus said.
Experts say it is imperative that legislators and the general public take this clash of mass influence with little accountability seriously. The Biden administration took a meaningful step in that direction, inviting top influential people to the White House.
For their part, influencers are also recognizing the power they have. An 18-year-old TikTok star with more than 10.5 million followers told the Washington Post that she sees herself as “a White House correspondent for Gen Z” to “relay information in a more digestible way” .
