Anti-vaccine TikTok videos being viewed millions of times by children as young as nine
Children as young as nine had been able to access Covid-19 misinformation content despite TikTok only permitting full access to the app for those aged 13 and over. Picture: Kiichiro Sato/AP
Lies and conspiracy theories about Covid-19, which have amassed millions of views and are accessible to young children, have been available on the social media platform TikTok for months.
TikTok accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers that discourage vaccination and peddle myths about Covid survival rates were uncovered by NewsGuard, an organisation that monitors online misinformation.
NewsGuard said it published its findings in June and sent them to the British government and World Health Organization (WHO), but the content remained on the platform.
The revelation comes amid renewed concern about the impact that social media is having on young people, after it was reported that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, had internal research showing its app was harming teenagers .
As part of its investigation, NewsGuard said children as young as nine had been able to access the content, despite TikTok only permitting full access to the app for those aged 13 and over.
Three participants in the organisation’s research who were under 13 were able to create accounts on the app by entering fake dates of birth.
TikTok told it worked diligently to take action on content and accounts that spread misinformation.
Some of the accounts seen by had posted individual videos containing Covid misinformation that had attracted up to 9.2m views.
The misinformation included false comments about side-effects of specific brands of Covid vaccine and misleading comparisons between Covid survival rates and vaccine efficacy rates.
Alex Cadier, of NewsGuard, said: “TikTok’s failure to stop the spread of dangerous health misinformation on their app is unsustainable bordering on dangerous."
“This is made worse by the fact that the more anti-vaccine content kids interact with, the more anti-vaccine content they’ll be shown.
“They say they’ve taken down 30,000 videos containing Covid-19 misinformation in the first quarter of 2021, which is a good step, but how many are left?
"Of the ones they deleted, how many views did each get? Who shared them? Where did they spread? Where did they come from?
"How many users mostly see misinformation when they see Covid-19 related content?”
On Friday, the reported an investigation by the digital rights charity 5Rights had alleged that dozens of tech companies, including TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram, were breaching the UK’s new children’s code, which protects children’s privacy online.
One-quarter of TikTok’s 130m monthly active users in the US were aged 10 to 19 as of March 2021 and nearly half of the total number of users were under 30, the data company Statista reported.
TikTok has begun to eclipse other well-established social media platforms in popularity, having overtaken YouTube in average viewing time for Android users in the US and UK, according to the app analytics firm App Annie.
TikTok was the world’s most downloaded app in 2020, App Annie reported.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, an internet conglomerate based in China.
A TikTok spokesperson said: “Our community guidelines make clear that we do not allow medical misinformation, including misinformation relating to Covid-19 vaccines.
The debate over younger people and their interaction with social media platforms has been reignited over the past month following the revelations that Instagram knew via internal research that its app was harming the mental health of some teenage girls.
Facebook has described the revelations, published in after a document leak by the whistleblower Frances Haugen , as a “mischaracterisation” of its work.
The documents include a survey result that estimated that 30% of teenage girls felt Instagram made dissatisfaction with their body worse.
- The Guardian
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