"Aloha, beloved," says a smiling young woman from her kitchen. "About three, four days ago I made 'the cure'...to what's going around. It's actually called hydroxychloroquine," she explains. Hydroxychloroquine is the drug that ignited fierce debate soon after the coronavirus pandemic began. Following multiple studies, a broad consensus of medical experts, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, rejected claims that it could prevent or cure COVID-19 even as some, including then-President Donald Trump, continued to tout it.
The woman lifts up a plastic jug containing a murky yellow liquid. "It's made out of grapefruit peel and lemon peel and it's slow simmered and it's supposed to 'cure' that," she continues. "I'm telling you, hydroxychloroquine, quinine, can heal anything."
The video is the second one that appears when users search for "hydroxychloroquine" on TikTok. In the top 20 results for that search, four videos that pop up promote recipes for a do-it-yourself version of hydroxychloroquine, a prescription drug used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It can be produced safely only in controlled laboratory settings and is dangerous when not taken as prescribed.
Although the chef in the kitchen video never uses the word COVID, perhaps because that might attract TikTok's word-search-based content moderators, her promise that it can cure "what's going around" and "can heal anything" is clear.
A NewsGuard investigation found that TikTok's users, who are predominantly teens and young adults, are consistently fed false and misleading claims when they search on TikTok for information about prominent news topics.
The investigation found that for a sampling of searches on prominent news topics, almost 20 percent of the videos presented as search results contain misinformation. This means that for searches on topics ranging from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to COVID vaccines, TikTok's users are consistently fed false and misleading claims.
Asked for comment about these findings, a TikTok spokesperson says TikTok's Community Guidelines "make clear that we do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform. We partner with credible voices to elevate authoritative content on topics related to public health, and partner with independent fact-checkers who help us to assess the accuracy of content."
According to TikTok's publicly available Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, in the first quarter of 2022 TikTok removed more than 102 million videos for violating its guidelines. Less than 1 percent of these were removed for violating TikTok's "integrity and authenticity" guidelines, which, according to the Community Guidelines, include "harmful misinformation," defined as "misinformation that causes significant harm to individuals, our community, or the larger public regardless of intent." (NewsGuard sent six false or misleading videos to TikTok on September 9. All were removed by TikTok by September 12.)
On its website, TikTok states that newly uploaded videos automatically go through a round of AI-driven review. If the AI detects an issue, the video is either removed or sent to a human moderator for further review, the guidelines say.
The toxicity of TikTok has become a significant threat because new research from Google suggests that TikTok is increasingly being used by young people as a search engine, as they turn to the video-sharing platform, instead of Google, to find information. In 2021, TikTok surpassed Google as the most popular website worldwide, according to the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare. The Wall Street Journal in August referred to TikTok as the "new Google."
NewsGuard's findings come as TikTok faces increased scrutiny over its moderation and data-collection practices, as well as its ties to China. TikTok is owned and operated by ByteDance, a Chinese internet conglomerate partially owned by the Chinese government. Despite being owned by a Chinese company, however, TikTok is banned in China, even as its influence spreads across Western democracies.
Searching for Information, Finding Misinformation
This September, four U.S.-based NewsGuard analysts contrasted search results on TikTok and Google to find information about the 2020 presidential election, COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, abortion and school shootings, among other topics in the news. TikTok—whose library of user-generated videos can be easily searched by typing in keywords in its search bar—repeatedly delivered videos containing false claims in the first 20 results, often within the first five. Google, by comparison, provided higher-quality and less-polarizing results, with far less misinformation.
NewsGuard analyzed 540 TikTok results, based on reviewing the top 20 results from 27 searches on news topics. Of the search results, NewsGuard found that 105 videos—19.4 percent—contained false or misleading claims. These search terms included neutral phrases, such as "2022 election" and "mRNA vaccine," as well as searches that might be used to learn more about controversial news topics, such as "January 6 FBI" and "Uvalde tx conspiracy." Many of these charged phrases were suggested by TikTok's search bar when NewsGuard typed in the neutral phrases.
For example, when a user enters the term "climate change," TikTok suggests searches for "climate change debunked" and "climate change doesn't exist." For a user who searches for "covid vaccine," TikTok suggests a search for "covid vaccine injury," "covid vaccine truths," "covid vaccine exposed," "covid vaccine hiv" and "covid vaccine warning."
By contrast, Google suggested more straightforward search terms. For example, searching "covid vaccine" on Google prompted "walk-in covid vaccine," "which covid vaccine is best" and "types of covid vaccines." None of these terms was suggested by TikTok.
Even when TikTok's search results yielded little to no misinformation, the results were often more polarizing than Google's. For example, 12 out of the top 20 search results for "2022 midterm" contained hyper-partisan, left-leaning rhetoric. The caption of one video presented as a search result referred to 2022 Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker as a "vegetable" while a person in another video proclaimed all Republicans to be "mother*uckers."
'The Election Was Stolen'
NewsGuard found that a search for information about politics, including the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the January, 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, often yielded false and misleading claims in TikTok's top results, including references to conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon.
For example, the first result in a search for the phrase "Was the 2020 election stolen?" was a July 2022 video with the text "The Election Was Stolen!" The video's narrator says the "2020 election was overturned. President Trump should get the next two years and he should also be able to run for the next four years. Since he won the election, he deserves it." (Election officials in all 50 states have affirmed the integrity of the election, and top officials in the Trump administration have dismissed claims of widespread fraud.)
In all, a search for the phrase "Was the 2020 election stolen?" returned six videos containing false claims in the first 20 results. Most results for the same search query on Google were articles debunking the claim that the 2020 election had been stolen. None advanced false information.
Remedies and Russia
NewsGuard's review also found that TikTok's search engine is consistently feeding millions of young users health misinformation, including some claims that could be dangerous to them.
For example, a search for the term "mRNA vaccine" yielded five videos containing false claims in the top 10 results—the second, fourth, fifth, sixth and 10th. Results for the same search query on Google linked to articles explaining how mRNA vaccines work from the websites of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Mayo Clinic, among others. None of the links advanced false or misleading COVID-19 claims.
The second, sixth, and 10th results featured identical clips of Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine scientist and prominent purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation, stating that the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine "forces your child's body to make toxic spike proteins," which "often cause permanent damage in children's critical organs." (The claim that the spike protein generated by the COVID-19 vaccines is "toxic" and can "often cause permanent damage" in children has been refuted by multiple vaccine experts and news outlets.)
When a NewsGuard analyst searched for the term "Bucha," the first search term suggested by TikTok's search bar was "Bucha fake." The first, second, fourth, ninth, 12th and 14th results for that search falsely claimed that the massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha was fake or staged, despite numerous accounts from news organizations and human rights groups documenting the killings. The 12th result displayed a video of soldiers fiddling with a dummy. The on-screen text said, "Why do Ukrainians need to make fake corpses?"
For all that misinformation, however, TikTok has recently sought to advertise itself as a learning platform, as data shows declining social media use among young people. In June, TikTok launched an ad campaign around the hashtag #TikTokTaughtMe, claiming "there is no limit to the knowledge that can be discovered on TikTok."
Jack Brewster is a senior analyst at NewsGuard. Lorenzo Arvanitis, Valerie Pavilonis and Macrina Wang are staff analysts. NewGuard is a company that rates the credibility of news and information websites and tracks online misinformation.
