There is a lot of political content on TikTok. Much of it has the spontaneous, home-made look of other TikTok content. But looks can be deceiving. Some political TikToks are financed by political influence organizations like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and, worse, they often give no indication that they are, in essence, paid political ads. That’s the troubling finding of a new study by researchers at Mozilla. “What we found was evidence of paid or material relationships between political influencer influencers on TikTok and political organizations in the U.S. across both sides of the (political) spectrum,” said Mozilla researcher Becca Ricks, who co-authored the report. Mozilla is now calling on TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, to be more transparent about which short videos on its app are posted by influencers receiving funds from political groups. On Thursday, the nonprofit launched a public petition urging TikTok to prioritize ad transparency. “[W]e looked into the metadata of posts on TikTok and found that TikTok does not seem to be monitoring these posts and considering them as advertising,” Geurkink says. Mozilla found more than a dozen TikTok influencers across the political spectrum that have undisclosed paid relationships—or “dark money” arrangements—with various political organizations in the U.S. TikTok has managed to stay mostly out of the discussion of the social media mis/disinformation crisis by proclaiming that it would not sell political ads on its platform. But, Mozilla points out, even though TikTok doesn’t sell political ads via its social platform (as Facebook does), it’s still easy for political organizations to form direct financial arrangements with TikTok influencers to spread a certain point of view
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The political TikToks in your feed might be ads in disguise