Continuing to protect the integrity of TikTok through the US elections

By Suzy Loftus, Head of USDS Trust & Safety

In January, we shared our plan to protect our 170M+ US community members through the 2024 US elections. TikTok expects to invest more than $2 billion in trust and safety this year, including continued investment in election integrity and our US operations. Today, we're sharing an update on additional media literacy features, expert partnerships, and transparency investments that will further strengthen how we're protecting the safety and integrity of our platform during this election year.

Expanding our US Election Center

During major elections, we build resources like Election Centers which provide access to facts about voting when people view or search for relevant election content on our platform. In January, we launched our US Election Center with nonprofit Democracy Works, and since then it's been viewed more than 7 million times.

Today, we're expanding the resources available in our US Election Center, in partnership with nonprofit Democracy Works, to help our community access reliable information about the election. Updates include new, detailed voting FAQs from authoritative sources that can help people better understand how elections work. And in November, we'll work with The Associated Press to make election results available in our app in real time. We'll also provide our community with access to details about what's on the ballot in this cycle, and link them out to reliable third-party sources where they can access more information.

We're also launching videos to raise awareness about TikTok's safety tools and equip our community with best practices on spotting potential misinformation. We partnered with MediaWise to develop a series of media literacy content, and will build on these in the coming weeks by adding additional videos in Spanish from Factchequeado to our Election Center. These will help users make more informed decisions about voting.

Deepening partnerships with experts and our community

We've continuously consulted with a range of independent experts over the last year and further tightened relevant policies on harmful misinformation, foreign influence attempts, hate speech, and misleading AI-generated content based on some of their input.

To help us regularly tap into insights from outside of TikTok, we formed a US Elections Integrity Advisory Group. This group is comprised of experts in elections and civic integrity, hate, violent extremism, and voter protection issues and are consulted regularly to provide insights and recommendations to optimize our elections integrity approach. We're also educating public figures who have TikTok accounts to raise awareness of our safety features and policies, and our rules prohibiting political advertising. We're also continuing to invest in security and user reporting by:

• Adding an additional and stronger layer of security by requiring two-step verification for accounts belonging to governments, politicians, and political parties in the US.
• Onboarding more than 27 organizations to our Community Partners program, where experts report potentially violative content.

These efforts build on the work we already do to combat harmful misinformation and provide features that share context about content and accounts. For example, we partner with 19 fact-checking organizations globally who help evaluate the accuracy of TikTok content, and we label content that they determine is unsubstantiated. When they confirm misinformation, we either remove it or make it ineligible for the For You feed, in line with our policies.

Sharing progress transparently

To bring ongoing transparency to our work, today we've launched a new US Election Integrity Hub in our Transparency Center. We'll be providing continuous updates on steps we're taking to protect TikTok during the elections, including misinformation we're taking action on, new media literacy content, and ways we're applying feedback from experts, including our US Elections Integrity Advisory Group.

To learn more about our overall approach to elections globally, visit our Transparency Center here.

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