A new study has found that TikTok’s search suggestions contain toxic language toward women and minorities in Finland.
The lack of moderation on TikTok has led to the appearance of sexist language in search suggestions for female politicians and the dissemination of almost exclusively negative information about certain politicians.
These are the conclusions from Finnish methodologies company CheckFirst and fact-checking service Faktabaari, as part of their CrossOver project.
For example, suggestions for former Prime Minister Sanna Marin included “Sanna Marin masturbation video.”
Suggestions for Eva Biaudet, a member of parliament for the right-wing Swedish People’s Party in Finland, included “Eva and Kristian making love in the sauna.”
Search suggestions are partly influenced by searches made by other users, which means they may unintentionally perpetuate stereotypes and false claims.
According to the report, some of these suggestions were not random, but related to research conducted and videos produced about the individuals concerned, and many of them were negative or problematic.
Search suggestions were often accusatory or critical of politicians, such as “renegade” for Mauri Peltokangas, an MP from the far-right Finns Party, and “child abduction” for Pekka Haavisto, an MP from the centre-left Green League.
All of this has potentially created a bias in how the public perceives them and is particularly dangerous in the run-up to an election, as was the case with Finnish content in the run-up to the European elections.
More broadly, TikTok search results contained harmful language against marginalized groups, including women, Jews and the LGBT community, the report said.
Suggestions for “women” included “in the kitchen” and “shut up,” while other autocomplete phrases suggested were “Roma steal” and “refugees out.”
These suggestions worsen hate speech, the report said, adding that TikTok is not doing enough to combat bigotry on its platform.
There have also been controversial suggestions related to COVID-19.
While they typically lead to videos of experts refuting vaccine fears, content discussing the supposed dangers of vaccines still slips through the cracks.
The report said the presence of these videos suggests that TikTok’s measures to combat misinformation need to be scrutinized more closely and that the platform should moderate its search suggestions.
As more people get their information from social media, it is essential that they put measures in place to combat harmful and misleading speech.
“Recommendations are partly based on hashtags, and even rarely used hashtags end up in search suggestions,” explains Guillaume Kuster, co-founder of CheckFirst, in a written statement. “This means that search results can be easily influenced by automating videos with specific hashtags.”
“TikTok should also explore other ways to direct users to accurate election information, as labeling videos as election content is clearly insufficient. TikTok could offer users election information and reminders to vote, as other platforms do (sic),” he added.
A TikTok spokesperson told The Cube: “We are devoting significant resources to protecting the integrity of our platform during the election, including connecting our community to trusted information, and removing harmful searches and other violations of our policies.”
“We are continually investing in improving and strengthening our processes, including in local languages,” the spokesperson added.