(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A New York Times article on Sunday called for China-based social-media giant TikTok to censor American users from promoting election integrity and transparency ahead of the November midterm elections, the Federalist reported.
According to Times author Tiffany Hsu, the popular app exercises massive influence over public opinion, and is a wellspring of misinformation.
“TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information,” Hsu claimed.
She also noted that the New York Times has contacted TikTok in the past, using its clout to force the social-media app into censorship, especially in the wake of the 2020 election.
“Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month,” Hsu wrote.
“Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times,” she added.
Hsu suggested that TikTok has failed to slow the spread of misinformation in foreign elections, citing recent elections in France, Australia and Kenya as examples.
“The app struggled to tamp down on disinformation ahead of last week’s presidential election in Kenya,” she wrote.
Such a threat to democracy cannot be tolerated, said Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, who told Hsu that TikTok must begin to censor—or be censored.
“The bottom line is that all platforms can do more and need to do more for the shared set of facts that social democracy depends on,” Brookie said.
“TikTok, in particular, sticks out because of its size, its really, really rapid growth and the number of outstanding issues about how it makes decisions.”
