According to a study published Wednesday by NewsGuard, cited by AFP, misinformation on TikTok has reached alarming levels, especially as teenagers increasingly use the app to find information.

In early September, the organization conducted research on a range of news topics, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Covid vaccines, and found that 20% of the videos that appeared in the results contained false or misleading information.

It highlights a video in which a young woman reveals her prescription for the “drug”, hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment that appears to be ineffective against Covid.

According to NewsGuard, “TikTok’s toxicity is now a significant danger, as Google searches show that TikTok is increasingly being used by young people (…) to find information.”

“In 2021, TikTok surpassed Google as the most popular website in the world, according to Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and services company that specializes in news website ranking tools.

Overall, NewsGuard researchers say that even search results that don’t contain misinformation “often generate more disagreement than Google’s results.” They cite offensive language in many videos about the US election.

“Our policy clearly states that we do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we remove content that falls into this category from the platform,” a TikTok spokesperson told AFP.

The application also believes that the study’s methodology is flawed because it draws conclusions from limited research.

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