"TikTok and Facebook fail to detect election disinformation in the US, while YouTube succeeds", 21 October 2022

An investigation by Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) team at NYU Tandon looked at Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube's ability to detect and remove election disinformation in the run up to the US midterm elections.

The investigation revealed starkly contrasting results for the social media giants in their ability to detect and act against election misinformation. TikTok fared the worst; the platform, which does not allow political ads, approved a full 90% of the ads containing outright false and misleading election misinformation.

Facebook was only partially effective in detecting and removing the problematic election ads. Only YouTube succeeded both in detecting the ads and suspending the channel carrying them, though this is in glaring contrast to the platform's record in Brazil, where similar ads were approved.

Our investigation tested whether three of the most widely-used social media platforms in the United States – Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Facebook, and TikTok – were able to detect election-related disinformation in ads in the run-up to the midterm elections on Tuesday 8th November.

All ad content tested by Global Witness and C4D contained outright false election information (such as the wrong election date) or information designed to discredit the electoral process, therefore undermining election integrity. The experiments were conducted using English and Spanish language content. We did not declare the ads as political and didn’t go through an identity verification process. All of the ads we submitted violate Meta, TikTok and Google’s election ad policies.

After the platforms had informed us whether the ads had been accepted, we deleted them so they weren't published. Our experimental protocols were reviewed and deemed to not be human subjects research by New York University’s Institutional Review Board, which reviews the ethics of experiments involving human research subjects.  

Our findings are a stark reminder that “where there’s a will, there’s a way” – YouTube not only prevented all election disinformation ads from appearing in the US, it also banned our channel outright. This shows the stark difference in its enforcement efforts during high-profile national elections: in the US they rejected all our disinformation ads whereas in Brazil they approved them all, despite the fact that the election disinformation was very similar and the investigations took place at the same time. 

And despite problematic ads still slipping through, Meta’s Facebook showed the stark difference between its moderation efforts in the United States as opposed to the rest of the world, with previous Global Witness investigations finding 100% of election disinformation ads tested in Brazil and 100% of hate speech ads tested in Myanmar, Ethiopia, and Kenya making it through Facebook’s systems. 

With election day in the US just weeks away, and with voting already underway in some states, TikTok and Facebook simply must get their political ad policy enforcement right – and right now.