#90: Misinformation
... in nearly 20% of all TikTok's search suggestions
Hello!
This is Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. I have just watched the first TikTok video by Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. It is so random. No captions. It is good. Or as Hypebeast reports: The first video he uploaded is a shot of him riding in a car with his ninth studio album Jesus Is King playing loud in the background.
Today we talk about:
📡 TikTok & Misinfo
🗞️ TikTok & News
🛝 The TikTok Top Twenty
📡 TikTok & Misinformation
In 2018, the European Commission convened representatives of major technology firms and the online advertising industry to develop a voluntary framework of industry self-regulation to fight disinformation.
In June 2022 a new strengthened code of practice on disinformation was signed by 34 sigantories comitted “to take action in several domains, such as; demonetising the dissemination of disinformation; ensuring the transparency of political advertising; empowering users; enhancing the cooperation with fact-checkers; and providing researchers with better access to data.” Yeah, TikTok signed it too (PDF).
Yet users, mostly teens and young adults, routinely encounter false or misleading claims when they search for information on TikTok, according to a NewsGuard study. Almost 20% of searches Newsguard sampled on news topics such as COVID-19 vaccines and the Russian invasion of Ukraine contained misinformation, NewsGuard found (USA Today).
NewsGuard analyzed 540 TikTok results, based on reviewing the top 20 results from 27 searches on news topics. Of the search results, NewsGuard found that 105 videos — 19.4 percent — contained false or misleading claims. Methodology: In September 2022, four NewsGuard analysts based in the United States ran 27 searches using special terms and questions listed here. To ensure that results were not curated to be affected by users’ previous activity, analysts deleted and reinstalled TikTok and created new accounts for each search, and ran Google searches using a privacy browser extension. Analysts took screen recordings of each search or archived the videos.
Addition: You want to dive real deep into the actual misinformation studies discourse? Check this.
🗞️ TikTok & News
94 minutes a day. That is the average TikTok watch time in August 2022, according to Insider, tweeted by Matt Navarra. Growth slows from 45% to 9% in the US but 94 minutes a day is still a lot compared to YouTube: 73 mins, Instagram: 54 mins and Facebook: 45 mins.
Listen up journos. During these 94 minutes news consumption has risen. According to a new Pew Research Center study that examined Americans’ use of social media for news consumption, 33% of TikTok users now say they regularly get their news on the social video app, up from just 22% in 2020.
For context: Facebook remains a primary source of news consumption across social media. Pew found that 31% of U.S. adults report regularly getting their news from Facebook, which is higher than the 25% who get their news from YouTube, the 14% who get it from Twitter, or the13% who get it from Instagram. TikTok was in fifth place by this ranking (10%).
🛝 The TikTok Top Twenty
TikTok is now available in over 150 markets across the world in 75 different languages. From time to time we need to check on the stars. They can dance (Polygon: Charli D’Amelio’s Dancing with the Stars debut was huge). They earn a lot of money (TubeFilter: Khaby Lame gets paid about $400,000 for each sponsored TikTok). And they get a little extra treatment (Forbes: How TikTok Has Bent Its Rules For Its Top Creators).
Here is the actual top 20 list of most followed TikTok accounts according to dexerto. Yeah, i know that likes are more important than followers. But whatever.
I must admit that i did not know Kimberly Loaiza – in 2020 had become one of the top celebrities on the internet as she launched a clothing line, had achieved great musical successes, opened her own telephone company and as if that were not enough she had broken Yuya's record by becoming the Spanish-speaking youtuber with the most subscribers on YouTube. I had no idea about Domelipa – a well-known and famous Mexican TikTok star, Instagram Personality, and YouTuber from Monterrey, Mexico. And i was not aware of Burak Özdemir – named CZN Burak, a Turkish chef and restaurateur.
What else? Wired has a story on TikTok and AR filters. @stokel has all on TikTok Now aka TikTok’s BeReal. And TikTok is limiting politicians' access to monetisation tools (such as tipping and gifting) and advertising (TikTok Newsroom). But: Will it help?! Solve problems? Tom Divon tweets: The tricky part is to make the undetectable pattern of users’ propaganda more visible to moderation. In Israel, politicians are already overpowering their way into our social media bubbles by hiring nano-influencers to integrate political content into their mundane labor
This is a good video. Goodbye.
