'Ticked off: TikTok approves EU elections disinformation ads for publication in Ireland'

With the European parliamentary elections fast approaching amid fresh threats of election interference and disinformation campaigns, Global Witness decided to test how social media platforms YouTube, X/Twitter, and TikTok treat election disinformation, which new EU rules require platforms to mitigate.

For each platform, we submitted 16 advertisements targeted to Ireland containing content the EU rules warn against and the platforms’ own policies prohibit.

The platforms state that they review ad content before it can run, and while X halted all the ads and suspended the account ‘due to a policy violation’ and YouTube rejected all but two of the ads, TikTok approved every single ad for publication. After the reviews, we withdrew the ads before they could go live to ensure they were not shown to anyone using these sites. The ad content included false information about the closure of polling stations due to outbreaks of infectious diseases; the promotion of incorrect ways to vote such as by text message and email; and incitement of violence against immigrant voters...

The new [EU] Digital Services Act requires companies such as TikTok to mitigate the risks from content they carry that interferes with elections...

For this reason, Global Witness is submitting a complaint to the EU regulator sharing this evidence of TikTok’s failure in order to inform enforcement action...

Conclusion

...In Europe, Big Tech is now on the hook to make sure they tackle the risks their platforms present to democracy. With plenty of major elections still to come in this election megacycle year, social media companies need to get it right the world over...

Recommendations

Social media companies must ensure their systems protect human rights and democracy – including in the design of how they manage content on the platform. Platforms must ensure:

• Proper resourcing and transparency around efforts to uphold election integrity 
• Enforcement of robust policies on election-related disinformation, for both organic and purchased content
• Public provision of ad repositories for all ads in all countries
• Public and participatory evaluations of the impact of their content moderation policies on democracy and human rights; and
• Equity in the way the above measures are applied across all elections around the world, regardless of location and language.

We contacted TikTok with the findings of the investigation, to which they provided the following statement:

"...All 16 of the ads that Global Witness submitted violated TikTok's advertising policies. We have conducted an internal investigation to identify the cause of the leakage and determined that our systems correctly identified that all these ads may violate our political ads policies. They were then sent for additional review, where they were approved due to human error on the part of one moderator. That moderator has since received retraining, and we have instituted new practices for moderating ads that may be political in nature to help prevent this type of error from happening in the future. We will continue to regularly review and improve our policies and processes in order to combat increasingly sophisticated attempts to spread disinformation and further strengthen our systems."