Incident 185: TikTok's "For You" Algorithm Directed New Users towards Disinformation about the War in Ukraine

Description: An investigation by NewsGuard into TikTok’s handling of content related to the Russia-Ukraine war showed its “For You” algorithm pushing new users towards false and misleading content about the war within less than an hour of signing up.

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Alleged: TikTok developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed TikTok users and TikTok new users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
185
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2022-03-01
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.