ByteDance-owned social media platform TikTok said on Wednesday it will step up its fight against fake news and covert influence operations ahead of June’s European Parliament elections with a local language app in all 27 countries.
Tiktok said the individual local-language “election centers” will build on the work it first started in 2021 and which accelerated last year as Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and Spain went to the polls.
The app is designed to better inform Europeans about the election process.
Governments and politicians around the world are concerned about the spread of disinformation and the use of AI-generated deepfakes to influence elections and especially the role of social media platforms.
About 30 percent of lawmakers in the European Parliament use TikTok, the company said.
“Next month we will launch an Election Center in-app in the local language for each of the 27 individual EU member states to ensure people can easily separate fact from fiction,” said Kevin Morgan, Head of Trust & Safety EMEA at TikTok , in a blog post.
“Working with local election boards and community organizations, these election centers will become a place where our community can find reliable and authoritative information,” he said.
The company worked with news checkers to produce educational videos about the election process and disinformation through the election centers during national elections in previous years.
Morgan said TikTok, which currently works with nine fact-checking organizations in Europe, plans to expand its fact-checking network and launch nine additional media literacy campaigns this year.
It will introduce specific reports on covert influence operations in the coming months to increase transparency and accountability.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: February 14, 2024 | 12:02 pm IST