(Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
TikTok will launch 27 different "Election Centres" for each EU member country within its vertical video-centric social media app to help users find reliable and authentic information about Europe's upcoming elections in June, the ByteDance-owned company announced Wednesday.
TikTok also plans to set up a dedicated space in its Dublin, Ireland office to focus on combatting EU election misinformation.
The in-app election info hubs will be offered in each country's local language and provide information from official sources, according to the post. 30% of EU's Members of Parliament use TikTok, but the social media company won't let politicians publish paid political ads or profit off the platform.
TikTok says it has over 6,000 EU language content moderators reviewing content served to the EU's more than 134 million monthly users. The company also works with nine different European fact-checking groups and labels content that can't be verified to be true.
In the future, TikTok will also release information on "covert influence operations" it identifies and removes from its platform publicly, according to the announcement.
TikTok previously launched so-called Election Centres back in 2021 for elections in Greece, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, and Slovakia.
Besides word-of-mouth misinformation recorded and uploaded to TikTok, AI-generated or edited content of political figures or world events is also a potential cause for concern. In the US, fake President Biden videos and AI robocalls have already attempted to deceive citizens, for example.
But TikTok says it won't allow any "manipulated content" of political figures that could mislead users, and requires creators to label any photorealistic content made with AI tools.
TikTok's anti-misinformation push comes a week after rival platform Meta's Instagram announced it would label any AI-generated content—as long as it already contains metadata identifying it as such.
Elections for the EU Parliament will occur June 6-9 this year.