Research Confirms TikTok Is a Cesspool of Misinformation

A new report from Global Witness and NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy team found that TikTok is terrible at filtering out harmful misinformation regarding elections and politics. The report tested TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, all of which performed poorly at detecting and removing misinformation-laden advertising content uploaded by researchers. The researchers found that 90 percent of those fake ads were ultimately approved by the popular video app. This is the second time TikTok has come under fire for, um, threatening American democracy in recent days. On Thursday, it was revealed that the app’s parent company, ByteDance, had been planning on using its location data to spy on the physical locations of specific US citizens; it’s still unclear if they actually got around to it or not. . . .