TikTok Videos: How Fake News Goes Viral

TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps among young people. Political videos can spread rapidly there – even with false information. This is due to the algorithm, like research by BR and the ARD magazine contrasts demonstrate.

On May 5, 2021, a 15-year-old posted a video about the Greens on TikTok. It’s 40 seconds long and you can hear the rap song “Gangsta’s Paradise” from the 1990s. The video is set in the future, on election evening, is about the fictional victory of the Greens in the federal election and the bans that the party allegedly wants to introduce. For example, a ban on meat, New Year’s rockets or the sale of lemonade in schools.

Only one of the seven claims is true, namely the demand for a speed limit on motorways. TikTok itself prohibits in its guidelines the dissemination of misinformation “with which members of the community are misled in relation to elections or other civil society processes”. The video still goes viral and is viewed almost 500,000 times.

“Election Night” video becomes a meme

Shortly after the 15-year-old, more TikToker record similar clips in the same setting and with the same dramaturgy and upload them. The most successful clip achieved around 1.8 million views. The “Election Night” video has become a long-range meme. One of the TikTokers said that he recorded the video because TikTok was paying him for a lot of views and that he received a small amount for it. In total, more than 40 videos in this style appear in the following weeks and months. Some videos are also about the fictitious election victory of other parties, such as the FDP or AfD.

Network expert Karolin Schwarz has been dealing with false information for a long time. In conversation with BR and the ARD magazine contrasts she says that other parties are also affected: “There are also fake quotes attacking Markus Söder, for example. With the Greens, however, it is the case that they have the reputation of a prohibition party. The party is being attacked accordingly.”

Algorithm helps to achieve a large range

The short video platform TikTok from the Chinese provider ByteDance is particularly popular among young users and is one of the most downloaded apps worldwide. A team of journalists from BR Data, BR Research and Contrasts investigated together with the non-profit organizations Mozilla Foundation and National Conference on Citizenship (NCOC) political content on TikTok about the federal election.

Even accounts with few followers can land viral hits on TikTok. The reason for this is the so-called ForYou function (in German: FürDich). Here, users are not only shown videos of people they follow, as is the case with other social media platforms, but above all recommendations from TikTok. These videos are selected almost exclusively by an algorithm.

“Danger to young people”

“People no longer search for videos or users on the platform, but the algorithm decides what people see,” says Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, who researches algorithms at Princeton University. In the case of the 15-year-old TikTokers, 91 percent of the views came from TikTok’s FürDich page. An excerpt of the statistics is available to reporters from BR and RBB before. So the algorithm played a crucial role in the distribution of the video.

Papakyriakopoulos believes that false information on TikTok is a danger precisely because of the age structure of its users: “TikTok has a special characteristic. Very young people are active here. And these young people have often not yet formed their political opinion. If someone wants to influence them, they are active here. he has the opportunity to do that on this platform. “

TikTok refers to its own measures

Upon request, TikTok writes: “If we learn of content that violates our community guidelines, including disinformation or misinformation, we remove it to promote a safe and authentic app environment.” The company refers to a page with information on the federal election: “For the 2021 election we have introduced an in-app information page where users can find reliable and independent information on the elections from funk, Tagesschau and the young waves of ARD can.”

The link to this page is displayed for videos that TikTok considers relevant in connection with the federal election. Of the more than 40 “election evening” videos available, only a third are labeled accordingly. TikTok did not comment on this when asked.

Targeted influence difficult to see

It is difficult to tell whether lobbyists, political opponents or states are behind false reports on TikTok in some cases. Extremism researcher Anneli Ahonen from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a renowned think tank, believes it is possible that there are attempts to exert influence from abroad via social media in Germany: “It is a very serious problem that we currently have no possibility to understand whether a German teenager is behind a certain TikTok account posting funny videos or memes, or whether it is a foreign secret service actor. ” She calls for “more transparent platforms and access to data for researchers” in order to better assess this risk.

Annotation: We do not mention names under 18-year-old TikTokers in our reporting. All persons are known to the team of authors in their real names. You and / or your legal guardian had the opportunity to comment.