TikTok: The disinformation is everywhere

4 minutes read

TikTok: The disinformation is everywhere

TikTok is back in the news. Yesterday, Trump approved a deal between TikTok and Oracle. Oracle will take a 12.5% stake in a new company called TikTok Global, while Walmart will have 7.5%. The company will be headquartered in the US.

In my previous articles, I focused on some of the logs sent by the Android version of TikTok:

Today, we will focus on a different topic: the disinformation associated with TikTok.

I) Introduction

This story started a few days ago. During a conversation with a friend based in the US he told me: “My daughter asked me if Biden is a pedophile. She saw that on TikTok”. This sordid attack, promoted by Trump himself, is straight from the QAnon conspiracy. How could a teenager be exposed to such crazy theory?

We know for a fact that disinformation played a major role in the last US election. 4 years later, disinformation has changed but it is still here. In order to tackle this worldwide issue, I co-founded a new company called Predicta Lab. It’s now time to test our new tools to find disinformation on TikTok

II) Search PedoBiden content on TikTok

The “Biden is a pedophile” accusation can be found everywhere on social networks. Like all trends, the folks who created such content used hashtags to facilitate its propagation: #pedjoephilebiden2020, #joebidenisapedo, #joebidensapedophile, #bidenthepedo, #pedobiden, …

What do you find if you search these hashtags on TikTok? Nothing.

https://www.tiktok.com/tag/bidenthepedohttps://www.tiktok.com/tag/bidenthepedo

Is it because nobody used this hashtag? Nope

https://www.tiktok.com/@clewy9/video/6855423719184043269https://www.tiktok.com/@clewy9/video/6855423719184043269

So, why can’t you find these hashtags? It’s because TikTok blacklisted these hashtags from the search bar. To be more accurate, they blacklisted all the hashtags with the word pedo: #pedophile, #pedoelite, #pedo, #pedogate, #pedophilia, #pedowood, #pedoltics, #pedohunter, …

III) Popularity of PedoBiden content

As we saw, TikTok users cannot search for “Biden is a pedophile” videos. But that doesn’t mean such content doesn’t exist on TikTok. Despite this search bar ban, is this content popular?

Thanks to our internal tools at Predicta Lab, we found more than 50+ videos with a total of 451k views. Let’s see what we have.

III.1) The Savvy Truth aka Savannah

Savannah is a 16 year old US girl. This young Trump supporter with her 421.6K followers is quite famous on TikTok.

https://www.tiktok.com/@thesavvytruth/video/6860818977799539973https://www.tiktok.com/@thesavvytruth/video/6860818977799539973

In this video, viewed more than 257K times, she uses the QAnon hashtags #savethechildren and #joebidenisapedo. This is how today’s disinformation work: a pretty popular teenage girl spreading conspiracy stuff to her young audience.

III.2) llaurenkimm aka Lauren

Lauren and Savannah have a lot in common. Lauren is a 17 year old US girl. This conservative uses her account and her audience of 39.7K followers to promote the same QAnon conspiracy theories

https://www.tiktok.com/@llaurenkimm/video/6856842076496104709https://www.tiktok.com/@llaurenkimm/video/6856842076496104709

III.3) divinemercyitrustinyou

https://www.tiktok.com/@divinemercyitrustinyou?lang=enhttps://www.tiktok.com/@divinemercyitrustinyou?lang=en

Let’s be honest, this account is 100% into QAnon stuff. I’m not sure a comment is even needed

https://www.tiktok.com/@divinemercyitrustinyou/video/6872137963011116294https://www.tiktok.com/@divinemercyitrustinyou/video/6872137963011116294

In this video viewed 14K times, divinemercyitrustinyou relays the pizza gate conspiracy theory.

III.4) thatconservativeboi aka Jaxon Young

https://www.tiktok.com/@thatconservativeboi?lang=enhttps://www.tiktok.com/@thatconservativeboi?lang=en

Jaxon is that conservative boi… He is young, conservative and quite popular on TikTok too.

https://www.tiktok.com/@thatconservativeboi/video/6870202012592639237https://www.tiktok.com/@thatconservativeboi/video/6870202012592639237

In this video viewed more than 3K times, Jaxon is clearly saying that Biden is dating 12 years old girls…

TL;DR

In this article, we see that despite the effort by TikTok to limit its propagation, the QAnon theory “Biden is a pedophile” is very much present on TikTok. This theory is pushed by young and popular accounts with a large audience. If you are interested in looking into it, we are happy to share the full list of the videos we found: https://pastebin.com/3L576LqQ

I hope you liked this article. If you are interested in Predicta Lab’s work, feel free to email us at predictalab[at]protonmail.com and to follow us on social networks: