"Experiment finds TikTok, Facebook approve ads pushing election misinformation", 21 October 2022

Facebook and TikTok failed to block paid advertisements spreading misinformation about voting in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a new report from the human rights non-profit Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) Team at New York University.

For its test, Global Witness created dummy accounts on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube and attempted to run ten identical advertisements on each platform in both English and Spanish. Each ad contained "outright false and misleading election misinformation." The ads targeted voters in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania – all battleground states. Global Witness then went through the process involved in running this misinformation through each company's official ad platform.

All of the submitted advertisements were in violation of all three platforms' policies.

Yet, YouTube was the only platform to block all of these misinformation-spreading ads. Furthermore, YouTube was also the only platform that blocked the accounts that attempted to run the ads.

According to Global Witness and C4D, Facebook approved 20 percent of these ads in English and 50 percent of the ads in Spanish during one test. Another Facebook ad test that was conducted saw 30 percent of the English ads and 20 percent of the Spanish ads approved. One alarming issue with the latter test, however, was that they were submitted from a dummy account based in the United Kingdom, meaning that the account should not have been able to run political ads in the U.S. at all.

Facebook also only deleted one out of the three dummy accounts used to run the misinformation ads.

In a statement provided to researchers, Facebook said "these reports were based on a very small sample of ads, and are not representative given the number of political ads we review daily across the world."

But, Facebook did not fare the worst in this experiment. That designation goes to TikTok.

Unlike YouTube or Facebook, the viral short form video platform doesn't even allow political advertising on its platform. Yet, TikTok approved 90 percent of the ads featuring voting misinformation. The only ads it rejected were the ones claiming a COVID vaccine was necessary to vote.

In a statement provided to researchers, a TikTok spokesperson said that the platform "is a place for authentic and entertaining content which is why we prohibit and remove election misinformation and paid political advertising from our platform."

However, the TikTok account used to submit the voting misinformation ads was not removed until the researchers reached out to the company.

It should be noted that none of these ads were actually shown to users on any of these platforms as researchers removed the ads without running them after they were approved.