Intelligence officials have warned that the 2024 presidential contest could face an unprecedented flood of fake news, fueled by AI, from foreign actors. A Journal analysis of videos on TikTok has found it’s already happening.
Amid all the general political news and lighthearted election memes on TikTok, the Journal found thousands of videos with political lies and hyperbole. Further analysis led the Journal to identify 91 accounts that pushed these videos from China, Nigeria, Iran and Vietnam—and were tied together in complex ways.
These viral foreign networks are hijacking TikTok’s well-honed engagement machine with false and sometimes incendiary claims, and their intent or who’s behind them isn’t clear. TikTok says some are looking for profits. Cybersecurity experts say such groups often aim to cause chaos.
Whatever the intent, the divisive narratives corrode the country’s already acrimonious political discourse at a time when about a third of young Americans turn to TikTok for news.
Fake stories have thrived online since the earliest days of the internet. Initially most of these relied on misleading or doctored text and photos. Now AI and other automation tools have made it trivially easy to splice together clips and write and voice scripts at little cost.
“Anyone with $5 and a credit card can do this,” said Jack Stubbs, chief intelligence officer of research firm Graphika.
People can then spread these lies to huge audiences online with the help of addictive engagement algorithms that pick up users’ tastes.
TikTok, and other social-media platforms, are struggling to keep up.
TikTok’s rules forbid misinformation about elections that the company considers harmful. TikTok has said that it’s hired experts, added policies and built tools to try to thwart these players. TikTok and researchers say that bad actors keep changing tactics to bypass the platform’s defenses. …
A strange pattern emerged: Videos with obvious falsehoods about Trump, whose AI voices repeated the same odd turns of phrase, led the Journal to begin to piece together the web of 91 accounts.
TikTok served videos from the 91 accounts to nearly all the Journal’s bots, sometimes within hours of being set up.
The accounts were prolific. Over one month, they spammed TikTok users with more than 3,000 new videos, many pushing misinformation about Trump. The posts peaked at 152 videos in one day.
TikTok said it had already removed close to half of the 91 accounts before the Journal reached out to the company over the course of reporting. The platform continued to delete accounts after the Journal flagged them. Even then, the Journal’s bots kept getting videos from other accounts nearly identical to the ones that had been removed.