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TikTok and other social media platforms are also under pressure from US lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to curb Russian misinformation about the war, particularly from state-sponsored media outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik. In response, YouTube said it would block Russia Today and Sputnik in the European Union, while Facebook’s parent Twitter and Meta said they would label content from outlets as government-sponsored.
TikTok has also banned Sputnik and Russia Today in the EU, but has not labeled its outlets as government-sponsored in countries where they are still available. The app said on Thursday it’s dedicating more resources to watching misleading war-related content.
“We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased security and safety resources to detect emerging threats and eliminate harmful misinformation,” said TikTok spokesperson Hilary McQuaide.
For years, TikTok has largely escaped the constant scrutiny of its content. Unlike Facebook, which has existed since 2004 and YouTube, which was founded in 2005, TikTok has only become widely used in the last five years. owned by China’s ByteDance, the app was designed to make it easy to create and share one to three minute videos. It has gained a reputation as a destination for addictive, silly and funny videos, especially for younger users.
The practice has sparked some controversy in the past. faced with questions harmful whims turned out to be on its own platform and whether it allows underage users and adequately protect their privacy.
But the war in Ukraine has replaced the problems facing TikTok, which has more than one billion users worldwide.
According to a review by The Times, the volume of war content on the app far outweighs that found on some other social networks. Videos with the hashtag #Ukrainewar have garnered nearly 500 million views on TikTok, and some of the most popular videos have garnered close to a million likes. In contrast, the hashtag #Ukrainewar on Instagram had 125,000 posts and the most popular videos had tens of thousands of views.
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