Dusseldorf It was a prime example of fake news: On Tiktok, a woman told a selfie video about Ukrainian refugees in Euskirchen who are said to have beaten a 16-year-old refugee helper. He even died doing it. The video spread rapidly, on Tiktok, Telegram, then Twitter.
However, none of this is true. The Bonn police clarified that it was a “fake video”, the research collective “Correctiv” found evidence that spoke against the authenticity of the video. In the meantime, the woman has even apologized in a new video: she was tricked, she was told lies. Your fake video has already been distributed in propaganda media.
It is just one of many examples of fake news that keeps spreading on the Tiktok video platform. A new investigation by the US media start-up Newsguard has revealed that new users who scroll through Tiktok will see incorrect or misleading content within 40 minutes.
In March, six Newsguard analysts created new accounts on the platform, used it for 45 minutes and watched all videos related to the Ukraine war in full. The result: They all received a lot of false information at the time.
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Since the war began on February 24, 29.7 million posts have been published with the hashtag Ukraine2022, while the hashtag Ukrainewar has posted more than 1 billion. On Instagram, however, Ukrainewar was linked 317,000 times, Ukraine2022 a whopping 7,100 times.
Many Tiktok videos about the war have music.
The images of war are just a swipe away on Tiktok. The transition between banal entertainment and horror is fluid. Young people testing drinks, then there’s a clip of a tank on the street – it shoots towards a house, there’s a bang.
Another swipe, a teenager in a jogging suit is dancing through her room. Three more videos of soldiers in the trenches, shooting and being shot at. It is not clear whether the videos really come from Ukraine or not.
More than a billion users monthly
The app, which belongs to the Chinese group Bytedance, is particularly popular with young users. In September 2021, Tiktok announced one billion monthly users worldwide for the first time. The technology analysis company CB Insights valued Bytedance at 140 billion US dollars in 2021. That would make it the most valuable unlisted company in the world.
Tiktok differs from other platforms in its use, as users should primarily produce content – not just passively consume it. The media researcher Hanna Klimpe from the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg has been investigating this in research on the platform for some time.
“Tiktok works memetically,” says Klimpe. This means you can quickly and easily quote content, recontextualize it, imitate it, and easily copy content from other users.
“This is the tactic that Tiktok uses to cleverly encourage people to create content.” The “Stitch” function, for example, helps with this, with which users can integrate and edit videos from others into their own.
>> Read about this: This is the biggest fake news about the Ukraine war
The app’s algorithm also relies on speed and mass. It counts how long a single video is watched, how many likes and comments it gets in total and who the viewers are still following. Videos that have been watched a lot are also played on the start page for many.
A function in Tiktok allows users to recycle contributions from other users.
“In this way, even incorrect content can be adopted, quoted and reproduced very quickly,” says media researcher Klimpe. And that’s exactly what happens with videos from the Ukraine war.
In its investigation, for example, Newsguard found footage of a firefight that actually dates from 2015 and shows a fight between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Or videos with false claims that the US runs bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine or that the country is run by a neo-Nazi military.
Many videos with audio recordings from other contexts
A spokeswoman for Tiktok explained that it was not about “the normal viewing behavior” of users on Tiktok. “We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased security resources to remove harmful misinformation,” she says. “We also work with independent fact-checking organizations.”
Marcus Bösch, media scientist and Tiktok researcher in Hamburg, points to “recycled” audio recordings that can be placed over other videos in Tiktok. “What you can often see are old recordings or recordings that come from completely different contexts,” says Bösch. Some users pretend to be in Ukraine, but are actually not there.
This is possible with an audio function in Tiktok that allows you to overlay sound recordings from other videos over your own. Some users would also accompany war videos or videos with political content with popular music in order to generate reach.
Uschi Jonas, fact checker at Correctiv, also notes that more and more fake news is being spread on Tiktok. Your team is now working on its own monitoring for fake news on Tiktok. “The more elements there are in a video, the more opaque it becomes as to what’s edited and what’s ‘real,'” says Jonas. She recommends her own tactics for spotting fake news, which she also applies to fact-checking.
Above all, one should ask oneself fundamental questions: What is specifically claimed in the video? Are sources given? Do reputable news sites report on this? In addition, says Jonas, you can view the metadata of videos, i.e. when they were recorded and whether an audio track was added later. A reverse image search of screenshots from the video can also be helpful.
Despite everything, says Klimpe, Tiktok can also be used for serious journalistic content. After all, you can reach young users there who are primarily looking for news on social media. The Tagesschau also operates a Tiktok account. “You just have to understand the logic of how content is distributed there and prepare accordingly,” says the media researcher. “Tiktok was never just a fun entertainment platform.”
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