Young voters targeted with misleading election content on TikTok

BBC investigation finds fake, AI generated videos being shared by genuine users and bots

With X’s community notes function proving useful at highlighting misinformation, TikTok has emerged as a key new social media battleground for the forthcoming election.

Social media was always going to be key in the parties efforts to reach voters during the election campaign. Both Labour and Conservatives have spent big on Facebook and Instagram ads (both of course owned by Meta) and by the end of May, Labour had outspent the Conservatives on YouTube by five times over.

However, it is TikTok that is the focus of a recent BBC Undercover Voters project which has found widespread sharing of videos containing misinformation, faked footage often involving party leaders and also abusive content and comments.

TikTok is a hugely important platform and has grown enormously since the last election in 2019. According to Ofcom it's an important source of news for both adults and teenagers.

Some of the videos found by the investigation have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, including one pushing a rumour that it was a major scandal which promoted Righi Sunak to call an election when he did, and the continually debunked claim that Sir Keir Starmer was responsible for the states failure to prosecute Jimmy Saville for his serial crimes.

Another claimed that under the terms of the National Service plan being mooted by the Conservatives, 18 year olds would be shipped off to fight in Ukraine and Gaza.

Content is being shared by genuine users who might well believe that the content is legitimate, but also by political activists and anonymous bot accounts.

The Undercover Voters project created 24 fictional profiles across all the social media sites. The profiles are based on data from the National Centre for Social Research and represent a range of voters in battleground constituencies across the UK.

Marianna Spring, who is the BBC 's disinformation reporter and social media correspondent, observed more comments in favour of Reform UK than any other party and tried to contact those posting them. Some were real people who had no affiliation to Reform UK, but others looked like bot accounts.

The investigation, perhaps unintentionally, showed how difficult it is to police this kind of content – not least because in our present political landscape distinguishing parody from reality is quite an ask, even for seasoned politicos.

Whilst some parody and satire videos are clearly captioned as such, some of the comments unearthed by the investigation illustrated that at least some TikTok users are confused about which claims are factual and which are the parodies.

One 16-year-old girl who isn't affiliated to any party made a parody of a genuine Rishi Sunak TikTok on national service "for a joke." She got more than 400,000 views and conceded that her video could mislead people but also said she hoped people could tell it was just meant to be a bit of fun.

It's difficult to see what more TikTok can – or should – do about 16-year-olds essentially taking the micky out of politicians which they have every right to do. But other aspects of the BBC investigation are worrying, particularly those concerning deepfakes of politicians.

A spokesperson for TikTok told the BBC that it had increased its investment "in efforts to ensure reliable information can be found on TikTok", launching a "UK Election Centre with a fact-checking expert" and adopting an "industry-leading AI labelling technology".

It also said it was introducing "more policies to aggressively counter foreign election interference" and that it removed 97% of videos with misinformation about elections and civic issues before anyone had viewed them.

A survey from educational charity and thinktank Demos earlier this year found 61% of the public expressing concerns about how GenAI could damage democratic processes and norms in this campaign, and two thirds expressed a desire for the main parties to agree responsible use guidelines.

Clearly not everyone got the memo.