A new study has found that TikTok search suggestions contained toxic language towards women and minorities in Finland.
TikTok’s lack of moderation caused the appearance of sexist and objectifying language in search suggestions for female politicians and promoted almost exclusively negative information about certain politiciansboth men and women.
These are the conclusions from Finnish methodology company CheckFirst and fact-checking service Faktabaari, as part of its CrossOver project.
For example, suggestions for former Prime Minister Sanna Marin included “Sanna Marin masturbation video“.
Suggestions for Eva Biaudet, an MP from the center-right Finnish Swedish People’s Party, included “Eva and Kristian have sex in the sauna“.
Search suggestions are influenced in part by the searches made by other usersmeaning they can inadvertently perpetuate stereotypes and false statements.
According to the report, some of these suggestions were not random, but were related to searches carried out and videos produced about peopleand many of them were negative or problematic.
The search suggestions were often accusatory or critical of politicians, such as “traitor” for Mauri Peltokangas, deputy of the far-right Finnish Party, and “child kidnapper” for Pekka Haavisto, a lawmaker from the center-left Green League.
All of this can create a bias in public perception and it is especially dangerous on the eve of an election, as happened with content in Finnish on the eve of the European elections.
More generally, TikTok search results contained harmful language against marginalized groupssuch as women, Jews and the LGBT community, according to the report.
Suggestions for “women” included “to the kitchen” y “shut up”while other proposed autofill phrases were “Gypsies steal” y “refugees outside”.
These suggestions hate speech worsensaccording to the report, which adds that TikTok isn’t doing enough to counter intolerance on their platform.
There were also suggestions of controversies related to Covid-19. “Damage of vaccines” y “fear of vaccines” were two examples, and although they generally led to videos of experts debunking vaccine fears, content that discussed the supposed dangers of vaccines continued to slip through the web.
According to the report, the presence of these videos suggests that TikTok’s measures against misinformation should be further examined and that the platform should moderate your search suggestions.
As more and more people get their news from social media, it is crucial that social networks have measures to combat harmful and misleading speech.
“Recommendations are partly based on hashtags, and even those that are rarely used end up appearing as search suggestions,” said Guillaume Kuster, co-founder of CheckFirst, in a written statement. “This means that search results can easily be influenced by video automation con hashtags específicos”.
“TikTok should also explore other ways to direct users to accurate election information. Since labeling videos as election content is clearly insufficient, TikTok could offer users information about the elections and reminders to vote, similar to other platforms [sic]”he added.
A TikTok spokesperson told The Cube: “We dedicate significant resources to protecting the integrity of our platform during the election, including connecting our community to trusted information at our Election Centers, and eliminating harmful searches and other violations of our policies. “
“We continually invest in improving and strengthening our processeseven in local languages,” the spokesperson added.
