Ukraine: fake news alert on TikTok about the war

A new account TikTok can receive fake news about the war in Ukraine minutes after registering on the app, according to an investigation by the anti-disinformation agency NewsGuard. The company, which monitors the trustworthiness of news outlets on the web, ran tests to assess how the video-sharing app handled information about the conflict.

Ukraine: fake news alert on TikTok

The company discovered that a new account that did nothing but scroll through the various pages, watching videos about the war was coming directed towards false or misleading content in just 40 minutes. Undoubtedly alarming news, especially if we consider how much the Kremlin is insisting on the version of events, namely the one according to which no invasion is underway. Here is what emerged:

“Towards the end of the 45-minute experiment, analyst feeds were almost exclusively populated with both true and false content relating to the war in Ukraine, with no distinction between misinformation and reliable sources,” wrote the team Research, “At a time when false narratives about the Russia-Ukraine conflict are proliferating online, none of the videos provided to our analysts by TikTok’s algorithm contained information on source reliability, warnings, fact-checks or additional information that they could empower users with reliable information ”.

Between false statements shown to the researchers was the myth that the United States has biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. The videos also claimed that the fake footage was real and that the real footage was fake: the allegedly videos of the “ghost of Kiev” shooting down Russian jets were taken from a video game, while the actual videos of the war were denounced as fake by the wire. -Russian accounts.

In short, a truly remarkable confusion, which makes it difficult what is true and what is not. The hope is that social media can put a stop to this phenomenon.