As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine plays out online, the platform’s design and algorithm prove ideal for the messiness of war—but a nightmare for the truth.
of the app being abused to amplify false content. TikTok did not answer questions about the scale of fake content on its platform relating to the war in Ukraine, or how far content around the conflict had been shared off-platform. TikTok also did not respond to questions about how many moderators it employs and how many videos and livestreams the app has taken down.
The system can also be gamed by potentially silencing accounts like Vasyuta’s that have been favored by the algorithm. If TikTok’s features have inadvertently made it ideal for sharing videos of war, critics argue it needs to be more open about how it’s handling the war. When Ukraine was last invaded in 2014, Vasyuta was barely a teenager. Her country has now been in a state of war for eight years.
The issue is that Vasyuta couldn’t post on TikTok for nearly three days because of an error in the moderation of her videos. She was banned from posting, and it’s not clear why. Vasyuta’s suspension was only lifted early when WIRED contacted TikTok about it. Social media has long struggled with scale. But just as TikTok’s popularity has soared, collapsing the time taken to reach a billion users from eight years to four years, while also accelerating the speed at which video clips can go viral, so it has also found itself running into the same old problems.
When TikTok has worked correctly, it has helped the world understand the horrors going on in Ukraine. But when the app’s systems have been gamed by bad actors, it has tainted the world’s understanding of the war and sowed confusion far beyond the normal fog of war. Part of that, says Flores-Saviaga, could be a result of TikTok’s inability to process the scale of information it has created.
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