Videos, evoking without any foundation the existence of electoral fraud or theft of postal ballots, have notably found refuge on the network.

And perhaps even more worryingly, TikTok has endorsed paid political ads containing misinformation on its platform, even as the company claimed in 2019 to ban such practice.

"Hackers can easily change the results of the election! No need to vote!", Can we hear in a video whose content was developed by researchers from the NGO Global Witness.

In the experiment carried out jointly with New York University, and aimed at testing the limits of the ban established by TikTok, more than 90% of the misleading posts written by the team were authorized on the site.

"We are quite shocked by these results," Jon Lloyd, an adviser to Global Witness, told AFP, describing TikTok as one of the "dummies" when it comes to moderation.

polarizing

More than eight million young Americans active on the site will be able to vote for the first time this November 8.

And according to a Pew Research Center poll, more than a quarter of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 now check TikTok for information.

The sheer amount of content on the platform means that its "users, especially younger and more impressionable ones" will end up interacting with potentially polarizing or problematic posts, notes Matt Navarra, an expert social media consultant.

And if the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, has measures to limit conspiracy theories on the social network, "this does not mean that these are respected", explains Jon Lloyd.

TikTok is supposed to remove content related to "public health, electoral processes, facts and science" that could harm citizens.

But recent videos communicating in a misleading or false way about electoral fraud in the United States are still online.

"We take our responsibility to protect the integrity of our platform and the elections very seriously," a ByteDance spokesperson said in a statement to AFP.

“We continue to invest in our regulations, our safety, and our security teams to counter election disinformation,” he continues.

Other countries have previously reported similar problems with the network, including during the presidential election in the Philippines, as well as in Germany where fake parliamentary accounts were created, and in Kenya, where political propaganda thrives.

Within reach of all

In the second quarter of 2022, TikTok removed 113 million videos for violating its Community Guidelines, or around 1% of its published content.

Analysts, meanwhile, expressed no real optimism about an improvement in the future, recalling the course of the last US presidential election and the role of social networks in spreading rumors about the election.

“That Facebook passes for a good pupil in comparison on these questions, seems incredible”, underlines Steven Brill, president of NewsGuard, site which evaluates the sources of information according to their reliability.

According to Matt Navarra, the "very fast and very simplistic" format of TikTok videos makes creating and distributing content within reach of any user.

Combined with a powerful algorithm, it is then child's play to accumulate thousands of views at an astronomical speed, and this without necessarily having a large number of subscribers.

As for style, nuance often gives way to choppy content, accompanied by catchy music and added voice-over commentary.

It is then very difficult to distinguish myth from reality.

"If young people search for information about the election on the platform, they will find short-lived results, devoid of context" and often without explanation as to their source, concludes Jack Brewster, analyst at NewsGuard.

© 2022 AFP