TikTok struggling to enforce ban on political ads

A new report has found that TikTok is still unable to consistently enforce its official ban on political advertising. Facebook and YouTube are doing better – although there are caveats.

With less than three weeks before the US presidential election, the problem of political disinformation on social media has not diminished, researchers from the nonprofit Global Witness say.

In September, they decided to test the political ad moderation systems of three major social media platforms – TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube – by submitting ads that contained election disinformation.

One ad falsely warned that citizens have to pass an English language test to vote. Another claimed that Donald Trump is ineligible to run for president due to his felony convictions, and a third one called for a repeat attack on the US Capitol. Eight ads were submitted in total.

The goal was to examine whether these platforms can detect and remove harmful election disinformation. The three platforms differ in their rules for political advertising but the ads were designed to violate the policies of all three.

The investigation found that major issues remain. Whereas Facebook and YouTube performed quite well, TikTok, the only one of the three that prohibits political ads altogether, did not.

Of the eight ads, TikTok rejected only four – those that mentioned a specific candidate by name. It approved the ones that didn’t, including clips aimed at voter suppression.

TikTok’s performance has improved – ahead of the 2022 midterms, it approved a staggering 90% of the ads Global Witness submitted in a previous experiment. The percentage has now dropped to 50% – but this “obviously” still isn’t good enough, said the researchers.

Besides, the problem is not limited to ads submitted by researchers. In September, NBC News found that 52 political ads were running on TikTok in apparent violation of its policies.

Facebook only approved one out of eight ads in the test – one stating that only people with a valid driver’s license can vote. That’s unsurprising – Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has said more than once that his platforms will disengage from political content.

YouTube’s performance was the best, however. The Google-owned platform didn’t approve any of the ads and actually notified the researchers that their account was paused until they provided further verification of their identity.

Still, it remains unknown whether YouTube would have accepted or rejected the ads had the Global Witness researchers gone through the verification process.

Global Witness has urged all three platforms to increase the content moderation capabilities and, among other things, to publish “comprehensive and detailed pre-election risk assessments for the US 2024 election.”