A teenager taps the TikTok logo on a smartphone. A research report this week says nearly 20% of videos presented by TikTok's search engine contain misinformation on topics ranging from Covid-19 to the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
CNN —
When a TikTok user searches the social media app for information on top news stories, ranging from Covid-19 vaccines to school shootings, nearly 20% of the videos presented as search results contain misinformation, according to a research report published Wednesday.
Researchers at NewsGuard, a journalism and technology tool that tracks online information, searched TikTok and Google this month for information on major news topics such as the 2020 presidential election, the Russia-Ukraine war and abortion to compare the misinfomation delivered by their search engines.
TikTok, whose users are predominantly teenagers and young adults, “repeatedly delivered videos containing false claims in the first 20 results, often within the first five,” the report states. “Google, by comparison, provided higher-quality and less-polarizing results, with far less misinformation.”
A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the report when contacted by CNN.
The researchers searched terms such as “mRNA vaccine” and “2022 election,” as well as controversial news topics like “Uvalde tx conspiracy.” They analyzed 540 TikTok results and found that 105 videos, or 19.4%, contained false or misleading claims, the report says.
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