TikTok Ukraine War Videos Raise Questions About Spread of Misinformation - The New York... - 0 views
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“What I see on TikTok is more real, more authentic than other social media,” said Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles. “I feel like I see what people there are seeing.”
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But what Ms. Hernandez was actually viewing and hearing in the TikTok videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks taken from video games, as well as a soundtrack that was first uploaded to the app more than a year ago.
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TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app known for viral dance and lip-syncing videos, has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for sharing videos and photos of the Russia-Ukraine war. Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of videos about the conflict have been uploaded to the app from across the world, according to a review by The Times. The New Yorker has called the invasion the world’s “first TikTok war.”
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Many popular TikTok videos of the invasion — including of Ukrainians livestreaming from their bunkers — offer real accounts of the action, according to researchers who study the platform. But other videos have been impossible to authenticate and substantiate. Some simply appear to be exploiting the interest in the invasion for views, the researchers said.
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The clip was then used in many TikTok videos, some of which included a note stating that all 13 soldiers had died. Ukrainian officials later said in a Facebook post that the men were alive and had been taken prisoner, but the TikTok videos have not been corrected.
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“People trust it. The result is that a lot of people are seeing false information about Ukraine and believing it.”
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TikTok and other social media platforms are also under pressure from U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to curb Russian misinformation about the war, especially from state-backed media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik.
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For years, TikTok largely escaped sustained scrutiny about its content. Unlike Facebook, which has been around since 2004, and YouTube, which was founded in 2005, TikTok only became widely used in the past five years.
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The app has navigated some controversies in the past. It has faced questions over harmful fads that appeared to originate on its platform, as well as whether it allows underage users and adequately protects their privacy.
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That includes TikTok’s algorithm for its “For You” page, which suggests videos based on what people have previously seen, liked or shared. Viewing one video with misinformation likely leads to more videos with misinformation being shown, Ms. Richards said.
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“Video is the hardest format to moderate for all platforms,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook. “When combined with the fact that TikTok’s algorithm is the primary factor for what content a user sees, as opposed to friendships or follows on the big U.S. platforms, this makes TikTok a uniquely potent platform for viral propaganda.”
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“I feel like lately, the videos I’m seeing are designed to get me riled up, or to emotionally manipulate me,” she said. “I get worried so now, sometimes, I find myself Googling something or checking the comments to see if it is real before I trust it.”
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“I guess I don’t really know what war looks like,” she said. “But we go to TikTok to learn about everything, so it makes sense we would trust it about this too.”