TikTok promoting hate and misinformation, says report

Social media applications. [iStockphoto]

TikTok is emerging as a hotbed for misinformation and hate speech in the upcoming General Election.

This is according to a new report about the video-sharing platform that found dozens of content that violate Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Act and TikTok’s own community guidelines.

“We found content on the platform which, in the context of Kenya’s electoral history, is problematic and could fall into the category of incitement and hate speech along ethnic lines,” explains the report by the Mozilla Foundation.

“Many of the videos we reviewed contained explicit threats of ethnic violence specifically targeting members of ethnic communities based within the Rift Valley,” explains the report. The research was compiled after a review of more than 130 videos from 33 accounts that have been viewed more than 4 million times.

According to the report, the videos use images and captions that play on the narratives of the 2007/2008 post-election violence that saw hundreds of people loose their lives and many more displaced.

“The content targets specific communities with threats and uses past violence as a tool of fear,” explains the report. “All this means that TikTok’s current approach to content moderation in Kenya may not take into account the full cultural context to review and police such kinds of content.”

TikTok has in the past two years recorded a spike in growth in the country particularly in 2020 at the height of the pandemic when millions of Kenyans downloaded the App.

Active users

The growth of TikTok in Kenya has coincided with its global popularity and last year the app shot into the top 10 largest social media platforms with more than 1 billion monthly active users.

TikTok app's logo. [Reuters]

TikTok’s popularity has been attributed to its advanced algorithm that recommends new short-videos to users who often stay on the site for hours at a time.

In 2020, TikTok was forced to pull down 380,000 videos and banned 1,300 accounts in the United States on the back of pressure from the Trump administration to have the company sold off to a local firm.

“TikTok explicitly states that videos depicting things that may be shocking to a general audience may not be eligible for recommendation,” explains the report. “However, of the videos we reviewed, the content with the most gruesome images often got a higher number of views in comparison to those that didn’t.”

The report also found synthetic and manipulated content that is made to mimic authentic videos or news footage and presented in a documentary format.

According to the researchers, this includes footage copied from the popular Netflix documentary “How to become a Tyrant” that was presented as a mashup of clips from the documentary and Kenyan mainstream media news.

“This method has been highly effective at allowing misleading information to be distributed to Kenyans on the platform,” explains the report. “We identified several manipulated pieces of content on the platform that were widely viewed; a fake KTN news bulletin with a fake opinion poll and dubbed narration; a video showing a fake Joe Biden tweet; and various false newspaper covers.”

Community policy

Earlier this year, TikTok announced new updates to its community policy with a list of practices that could lead a video to be removed or downgraded in the recommendation algorithm.

TikTok app's logo. [Reuters]

These included new curbs on suicide or self-harm videos, those playing up eating disorders, misogyny or content that promote conversion therapy programmes.

“Transparency with the community is important to TikTok and these updates clarify or expand upon the types of behaviour and content TikTok will remove from the platform or make ineligible for recommendation in the For You feed,” said the platform in a statement announcing the new changes in February.

TikTok further said more than 91 million videos were removed from the platform in the third quarter of 2021, translating to 1 per cent of all videos uploaded.

“Of those videos, 95 per cent were removed before a user reported it, 88 per cent before the video received any views, and 93 per cent within 24 hours of being posted,” said the firm in a statement. This is the latest report indicating that social media platforms are being weaponised by various players to spread disinformation campaigns and derail constructive debate. Earlier this year, another report from Mozilla found that some Kenyan influencers were paid to spread misinformation on Twitter during debates on two Bills on reproductive health.

The research found that influencers were paid between Sh1,000 and 1,500 to derail online debate over the Reproductive Healthcare Bill (2019) and the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill (2019). According to the report, a Spanish-based organisation sponsored and co-ordinated the campaigns which included attacks on Kenyan politicians and activists.

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