I am sure you have come across posts where you are not sure if what the people are posting are true. I am sure you have also come across posts where you maybe are skeptical on the user posting the video or the comment section. Misinformation can’t always be caught and in some cases people will not know if what they are saying is even true just because they simply believe it at first site. But I am here to say there is an easy fix to this for TikTok and Instagram.
According to TikTok’s safety policy, their rule is “We have robust policies around specific types of misinformation like medical, climate change, and election misinformation, as well as misleading AI-generated content, conspiracy theories, and public safety issues like natural disasters.” A little further down on their page and they say “We also address disinformation by removing accounts that repeatedly post misinformation that violates our policies, and have expert teams who continuously monitor for disinformation campaigns, inauthentic behavior, and influence operations.”, meaning they monitor these accounts and if they see more fishy activity they get removed or get a temporary suspension.
Now for Instagram they are bit more professional when showing their rules about misinformation. On the official Instagram Help Page they say, “We use both technology and feedback from our community to identify posts and accounts that may contain false information. We also work with third-party fact-checkers across the globe who review content in over 60 languages and are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network to help identify, review and label false information.” So not only do they use third party sites and review it through fact checkers, they have community forms for people to fill out and send it in for posts that are not real as well.
Now for what Instagram does, Accounts that repeatedly share false information on Instagram may be restricted in other ways, such as:
:”We disable accounts that go against Instagram’s Community Guidelines. Learn more about our policies on these false information in Instagram’s Community Guidelines.
:If someone tries to follow one of these accounts, they’ll see a warning letting them know that the account has previously posted false information.
:We may also make posts by accounts that repeatedly share false information harder to find.”
From my own experience I have seen tons on peoples profiles on TikTok get taken down because they repeatedly spread misinformation and hate at the same time, but also because tons of people were following the account and it seems that people were trusting that account not knowing that it was just some random account with no proof. I did also notice when went back to this persons account, the account was removed because people notably saw that the account kept posting false and fake information and their account got removed. I think what’s hurting these sites is that they clearly don’t just want to remove peoples accounts or give people warnings for no reason, but I think people are making it harder and harder overtime to spot these fake accounts and to tell if people are really trying to share false information on purpose vs the people that want to spread false information and TikTok won’t know who to deal with because it feels like the same.
So you might be asking do these rules really stop misinformation and do people get annoyed about how good these rules are? The short answer to this is no. TikTok is one of the biggest social media platforms out right now and they simply do not care as much for fake news because they control what is allowed and what’s not. In How effective are TikTok misinformation debunking videos? They are not even talking about how bad TikTok’s rules are and how their tools to stop misinformation does not work. They more or less talk about ways to stop these accounts from spreading and how to reduce the impact on the spread on the mis information.
Improvements I would recommend for both Instagram and TikTok would be to spend more money on bots that are able to recognize both bot accounts and fake news and have the bots scan for little details that they are able to see from past victims and it keeps learning that way. Some people would say stricter rules but TikTok doesn’t really hold up to these rules and the rules would be useless so last rules I would suggest are better detection of AI content and more warnings and the warnings for repeating offenders get worse over time if they keep doing it.
Leave a Reply