They found out that the app did nothing special but just scroll the app’s algorithmically curated For You Page watching videos. It means that war videos also came in the feed which spread false content within 40 minutes.
Fake news about the Ukraine war Mislead New Users on TikTok
While telling about this, the research team said: “Toward the end of the 45–minute experiment, analysts’ feeds were almost exclusively populated with both accurate and false content related to the war in Ukraine – with no distinction made between disinformation and reliable sources,” It also added: “At a time when false narratives about the Russia-Ukraine conflict are proliferating online, none of the videos fed to our analysts by TikTok’s algorithm contained any information about the trustworthiness of the source, warnings, fact-checks, or additional information that could empower users with reliable information.” To perform this test NewsGuard’s team created new accounts on the TikTok app and spent 45 minutes scrolling through the For You Page and found videos that were related to the war in Ukraine. The social media company has not provided a detailed breakdown of the working of this Algorithm. Regarding this the researchers have found out that TikTok has “trained” the algorithm to show the new account’s content about the conflict which means to specific measures are taken to stop it. Also Read: TikTok is Rolling Out its stories to more users
