TikTok, the app we all complain about yet spend hours doomscrolling, said it removed 15,702 videos in Australia in 2022, flagging these ‘short form vertical vids’ as either dangerous misinformation, election misinformation, or medical misinformation.
15,702 is a lot, but as an unregulated app, one used by kids, companies targeting kids, and those looking to take advantage of kids, it’s genuinely surprising it wasn’t more.
Perhaps it should have been more, and that’s the point. TikTok doesn’t exactly benefit from not having people engage with its platform.
But, TikTok is removing stuff and that’s important – besides, that’s just from Australian accounts, not global ones.
What was surprising, however, is that of those nearly 16,000 videos that got pulled, 92.4 per cent of them were flagged as medical misinformation. In 2021, TikTok removed 12,582 videos for misinformation.
While every company making every platform sets out to be ‘the next big thing’, TikTok’s popularity exploded in line with the COVID-19 pandemic, in a way the app hoped for but didn’t expect and the company has since been playing catchup with the misinformation whack-a-mole game getting as aggressive as ever.
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While the company has teams, as well as partnerships and an armoury of tech tools, that identify misinformation, it said it also relies on the app’s users to report incorrect information. Not the best approach, especially when it’s a kid who hasn’t been exposed to such content before and with no safety net to confirm the 30-second video they watched 18 scrolls ago is legit.
The stats were revealed in TikTok’s 2022 transparency report, something it committed to publishing every year as part of its involvement in Australia’s voluntary code of practice that requires tech companies to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation on their products, platforms, and services.
It kicked off in February 2021, with TikTok joining Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Meta, Redbubble, and now Adobe and Apple, in signing onto the code that’s overseen by the Digital Industry Group (DIGI).
TikTok wasn’t the only platform that gave us 25-plus pages of nothing – the other seven did, too.