TikTok accounts that falsely claim to be run by German politicians and political institutions â including its parliament â are not being properly flagged by the video-sharing platform, researchers have found.
On 26 September, German citizens over the age of 18 will go to the polls for the countryâs federal election. But analysis of German political accounts on TikTok indicates that voters who use the app may be presented with disinformation that could sway their vote.
In July, TikTok rolled out a banner in Germany encouraging users to get more details on the election through a dedicated information hub. The intention was for this to be automatically displayed alongside videos labelled with certain hashtags such as SPD, one of the ruling German political parties, in an effort to combat potentially harmful videos.
Advertisement
But Becca Ricks at tech firm Mozilla has found that this warning isnât consistently applied. For example, some videos unrelated to politics, but using the SPD hashtag because it can also refer to a condition called sensory processing disorder, display the banner, while other videos that are explicitly political, posted by official accounts run by parties like Alternative fĂŒr Deutschland (AfD), havenât had a banner appended.
âThe platform publicly has made statements that they care about these issues and want to get it right in a way that other platforms havenât,â says Ricks, who with independent researcher Marcus Bösch.
âWhen you look at what German users are seeing, a lot of those things hadnât really been implemented effectively,â says Ricks. âWhich to me indicates that they havenât backed up some of these policy decisions with effective resources and engineering.â
The researchers also discovered a number of fake accounts followed by tens of thousands of people. These claimed to be run by politicians, but werenât in fact official, in breach of TikTokâs rules around impersonation.
Four different accounts were found to be registered under the name of German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, though the one with the largest following has now been deleted. Even the Bundestag, Germanyâs federal parliament, had a fake account. The videos posted on this account disproportionately featured AfD politicians, relative to their representation in parliament, though it isnât clear who actually runs the account.
Internal TikTok data from mid 2020, seen by żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”, indicates that TikTok has 10.7 million monthly active users in Germany, 76 per cent of whom are over the age of 18, suggesting that could be reached by these fake accounts.
âAlthough these accounts rarely do much more than cause mischief until they are reported and dealt with by the platforms, there is always the risk of causing real democratic harm before they are shut down,â says at the University of the West of England, UK. He also points out that the difficulties algorithms have with nuance highlighted by the researchers â such as the difference between the SPD political party and sensory processing disorder â is a risk for all social networks.
Buckley believes platforms should proactively verify political accounts are legitimate â particularly ahead of polling. âItâs not good enough to wait until an election is in full swing to deal with these sorts of fake accounts,â he says.
âOur community values authentic content, and we do too,â says a TikTok spokesperson. âFor the 2021 German federal elections, we are directing our community in Germany to trusted information on our in-app election hub.â
