Més enllà de reptes i balls virals: TikTok com a vehicle per al discurs desinformatiu i la verificació d’informació a Espanya, Portugal, el Brasil i els Estats Units

Abstract

This paper analyses the narrative of disinformation disseminated through the social network TikTok, a network which is popular at a global level and whose users are mainly young or very young. To do so, a study was carried out on the content of publications on TikTok in four countries with different idiosyncrasies and national realities: Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States. Interviews were also conducted with fact-checking agencies on the potential for misinformation and fact-checking potential on this social network. The results suggest that due to its characteristics as a fresh, visual network with easily shareable and viral content, TikTok is a network that facilitates the spread of disinformation, but which in turn is a tool for debunking hoaxes beyond the range of action of conventional media.

Corporate policies to protect against disinformation for young audiences: the case of TikTok

“…The central objective is to analyze the corporate policies that TikTok has implemented (mainly at the European level), the issues they aim to deal with, and how the social network has monitored and complied with said policies from 2020 to 2024, given that TikTok "is becoming a new home for fake news stories, manipulated media, and other types of misinformation" (Newman, 2022a(Newman, , 2022b. Unlike previous research that has focused primarily on analyzing the activity of verification agencies and fact-checkers (Ufarte Ruíz and Murcia Verdú, 2018;Alonso-López et al, 2021;Sidorenko-Bautista et al, 2021;Dafonte-Gómez et al, 2022;García-Marín and Salvat-Martinrey, 2022;Arrieta-Castillo and Rubio Jordán, 2023;Hidalgo Cobo and Puebla-Martínez, 2023) this study focuses on the platform's own corporate strategy.…”

“…Yes, TikTok aims to control the existing information flows on the platform. Nevertheless, there is a significant flow of content that encourages disinformation: sometimes this occurs unintentionally, though oftentimes it does so intentionally (Alonso-López et al, 2021).…”

Museum Games and Personal Epistemology: A Study on Students’ Critical Thinking with a Mixed Reality Game

“…Reasoning and critical skills are essential skills, especially for teenagers facing daily misinformation on platforms like social media [49]. A Twitter study showed that false news is more frequently shared than true news [50], and platforms like TikTok often promote disinformation [52]. It's vital to provide youth with tools to discern and counteract hoaxes [53].…”

Policy responses to false and misleading digital content

“…An additional study, also looking at the 2016 United States election, found that engagements with false or misleading content reached a peak of roughly 160 million per month at the end of 2016. By contrast, the top 38 major news sites, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, average around 200-250 million Facebook engagements per month (Allcott, Gentzkow and Yu, 2019 [32]).…”