The social media giant also said it would continue its ban on political ads ahead of European elections in June
The social media giant, which has 2m Irish monthly users, also says that it will partner with fact-checkers and direct people to “trusted information” to battle attempts by bad actors.
However, it also said that it would give politicians special treatment for controversial things posted compared to regular users.
“Deceptive actors do sometimes try to target online platforms during elections,” said Kevin Morgan, TikTok’s head of safety and integrity for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“We report the removals of covert influence networks in our quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement Reports. In the coming months, we’ll also introduce dedicated covert influence operations reports to further increase transparency, accountability, and cross-industry sharing.”
Mr Morgan did not comment on whether TikTok would directly grade or intervene in individual videos uploaded to the site. However, he said that the social network has more than 6,000 people working on moderating “EU language content”.
“Our teams work alongside technology to ensure that we are consistently enforcing our rules to detect and remove misinformation, covert influence operations, and other content and behaviour that can increase during an election period,” he said.
He said that between July and September of last year, 99pc of all the content “removed for election and civic misinformation” was taken down before it was reported to TikTok
“We have specialised misinformation moderators who are given enhanced tools and training to detect and remove violative content, as well as teams on the ground who partner with experts to ensure local context and nuance is reflected in our approach,” he said.
He also said that TikTok does not allow manipulated, AI-generated content [AIGC] “that could be misleading, including AIGC of public figures if it depicts them endorsing a political view. We also require creators to label any realistic AIGC and recently launched a first-of-its-kind tool to help people do this.”
TikTok is currently under investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner over whether, and the engine to which, it transfers European users’ personal data to China.
30pc of the European Parliament’s 705 MEPs have and use TikTok accounts, the company said. These individuals, as well as other political figures, are given special treatment when it comes to posting more controversial things, compared to non-political users.
“Accounts belonging to politicians, political parties, governments and news organisations play a unique role in civic discourse, and while we remove their violative content like we do for anyone else, we also apply more nuanced account enforcement policies to protect the public interest,” said Mr Morgan of the political exceptions.
“For example, if such an account were to post content promoting misinformation that could undermine a civic process or contribute to real-world harm during an election period, we may restrict that account from posting content for up to 30 days, in addition to removing the content for breaking our rules.”