Ashok Gupta
last month, tiktok Updates To its Community Guidelines, add policies prohibiting videos containing climate change misinformation on the app. As the daily beast Note, the change takes effect today, April 21st. According to the service’s announcement, TikTok will no longer allow content that “undermines the well-established scientific consensus” regarding the climate crisis.
TikTok will still allow videos that deal with discussions about climate change, such as government policies related to it, as long as they do not go against the scientific consensus. However, it will begin removing content that violates its new policy today, and any users searching for climate-related information will be directed to “official information” that TikTok set out in partnership with the United Nations .
Back in 2022, Internet trust researchers from NewsGuard published a report about misinformation. They had found that TikTok is full of misinformation about climate change, among other topics, and that searching for the term “climate change debunked” and “climate change does not exist” brought up search suggestions. During the height of the pandemic, searches for COVID-19 videos will also bring up suggestions that include “covid Vaccine hiv”. Furthermore, misinformation was especially prevalent during presidential election season in the US. TikTok had removed over 300,000 election-related videos and over 50,000 videos sharing COVID-19 misinformation.
When TikTok introduced its new policy regarding climate change, it also added new rules involving AI technology that creates content. All digitally manipulated or created media on TikTok must now come with appropriate tags, such as “synthetic,” “fake” or “modified.”