- Have you heard of Andrew Yang?
- Bernie is spot on.
- Trump 2020.
- [Narrator] TikTok, the increasingly popular
social media app, has been getting more and more political.
- [Male Voice] I love Trump.
- [Narrator] The platform's young users are taking to TikTok
to express their political views,
promote their favorite candidates,
and even react to political news.
But with 24 million active users in the US,
experts are warning that the platform could be used
to spread misinformation ahead of the 2020 election.
- TikTok is just a platform.
It looks like a fun video platform,
but it is a platform for speech.
And so that speech is gonna take many forms.
Video is hard to moderate
because it's just a lot of information.
It's not one picture, it's not one thing of text,
it's visual, and it's audio, and all of that is just really,
really difficult and time-consuming
and requires a lot of human labor.
- So, how exactly does TikTok work?
The social network makes it extremely easy
to create and share, so called video memes.
Well, all you gotta do is, pick an effect, record a video,
add some music and some text, wallah,
your TikTok is out in the world.
- [Narrator] TikTok is known
for its carefree and catchy content.
And the company says,
its mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.
But some users say they've noticed that political videos
get more attention than non-political videos.
Like this Trump dance post,
which got more than half a million views.
♪ I'mma vote Trump 2020 ♪
♪ Trump 2020 ♪
- From my Trump video,
it did start a lot of (laughs) argument or debate.
- [Narrator] Many users say they're drawn to TikTok
because it's easy to gain a large following,
and content spreads rapidly.
- You can post one video and instantly overnight be viral.
- It's given an insane and kinda unexpected opportunity
to a lot of young people to kind of express their opinions.
- Because TikTok videos can easily go viral,
there's also the risk that users will wittingly
or unwittingly share information that's false.
And once it spreads, it can be really difficult to stop.
For example, after President Trump was impeached
by the House of Representatives,
some users posted a false claim.
They shared videos saying,
the Constitution states a president impeached by the House
but not convicted by the Senate,
is eligible to run for office two more times.
But that paragraph in the video,
actually comes from the fact-checking website, Snopes,
which rates the claim as false.
The video which had tens of thousands of views,
was removed by TikTok
after The Wall Street Journal asked about it.
And in a statement,
TikTok said it does not permit misinformation
that could cause harm to our community or the larger public.
While this type of content is less common on TikTok
than on other platforms, we take the issue seriously
and remove deliberate attempts
to misrepresent authoritative sources of news.
But other videos, are less clear-cut.
For example, when the hashtag world war three
gained popularity after the US took out
Iranian general Qasem Soleimani,
many users posted videos about the draft,
which hasn't been active for nearly four decades.
While TikTok doesn't allow misinformation,
it makes exceptions for satire and humor,
which is why so many of those videos remain online.
- Of course, there's not yet a draft and so like the,
they are kind of over the top teenager videos of them,
saying that they don't wanna be drafted,
or afraid of being drafted or kind of reacting to it.
Is that them being political?
Is that them joking?
Or is that them being really serious?
It's really hard to tell.
- In 2016, misinformation and disinformation were spread
on various social media platforms, in various ways,
including in memes that appeared to be innocent.
There's no evidence
that coordinated misinformation campaigns
are infiltrating TikTok, and the company says
it remains vigilant.
But with the 2020 race picking up steam,
and millions of TikTok videos being uploaded
with political hashtags, experts warn that identifying
and flagging problematic content
could be a challenge for the relatively new platform.
- TikTok's at the very nascent stages of doing this,
and I think they have their work cut out for them
because they just might not have the sheer number of people,
let alone the rules in place
to kind of attack this information.