US: TikTok bans political ads ahead of midterm elections
The TikTok app logo.
AP - Kiichiro Sato
Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
The main social networks in the United States have unveiled their strategy to stem the proliferation of false political information on their platforms in the run-up to the American midterm elections by following the recommendations of the Federal Communications Commission.
The Chinese application TikTok announces that it wants to prevent content creators from posting paid political messages on its video distribution network.
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The TikTok application, suspected in the United States
of spying on its American subscribers on behalf of China
, recalls that the purchase of political advertisements has been prohibited since 2019 on its platform.
A ban that campaign teams had largely circumvented in previous elections, paying influencers directly to broadcast their messages in videos.
TikTok has decided to deploy internal teams specifically responsible for tracking down creators of political content who would be paid.
Industry giants bolster their moderation teams
All the networks reinforce their teams of moderation and verification of the facts in the messages that the Net surfers publish.
Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, also said it would block advertisers from running new political posts a week before the Nov. 8 election.
Twitter plans to place labels in front of certain misleading tweets and insert reliable and verified information in its news feeds.
But all the measures announced by American social networks are considered insufficient by civil rights NGOs in the United States.
They did not allow, according to their analysis, to stem the flow of false information online, during the last American presidential campaign.
►Also read: The Chinese social network TikTok dethrones the American giant Google in number of visitors
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