TikTok launches crowd-sourced debunking tool in US
WASHINGTON (AFP)TikTok on Wednesday rolled out a crowd-sourced debunking system in the United States, becoming the latest tech platform to adopt a community-driven approach to combating online misinformation.Footnotes, a feature that the popular video-sharing app began testing in April, allows vetted users to suggest written context for content that might be wrong or misleading -- similar to Community Notes on Meta and X."Footnotes draws on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content," Adam Presser, the platform's head of operations and trust and safety, said in a blog post."Starting today, US users in the Footnotes pilot program can start to write and rate footnotes on short videos, and our US community will begin to see the ones rated as helpful -- and rate them, too," he added.TikTok said nearly 80,000 US-based users, who have maintained an account for at least six months, have qualified as Footnotes contributors. The video-sharing app has some 170 million US users.TikTok said the feature will augment the platform's existing integrity measures such as labelling content that cannot be verified and partnering with fact-checking organisations, such as AFP, to assess the accuracy of posts on the platform.TikTok cautioned it may take some time for a footnote to become public, as contributors get started and become more familiar with the feature.Tech platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking.
Earlier this year, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying it had led to "too much censorship." As an alternative, Zuckerberg said Meta's platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use "Community Notes".
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