Countering influence operations

We believe that trust forms the foundation of our community, and we strive to keep TikTok a safe and authentic space where genuine interactions and content can thrive. We do this by countering misinformation and disinformation, and tackling deceptive behavior that may cause harm to our community or society at large.

TikTok’s integrity and authenticity policies do not allow coordinated attempts to influence or sway public opinion while also misleading individuals, our community, or our systems about an account’s identity, approximate location, relationships, popularity, or purpose. When we investigate and remove these operations, we focus on behavior and assessing linkages between accounts and techniques to determine if actors are engaging in a coordinated effort to mislead TikTok’s systems or our community. In each case, we believe that the people behind these activities coordinate with one another to misrepresent who they are and what they are doing.

We use several types of information (open-source and proprietary) to assess covert influence operations. We leverage a standard framework of confidence assessment to help ensure we’re making consistent and accurate determinations, which includes:

1. Evidence of coordination, such as evidence that accounts are working in coordination to spread specific narratives, or are operated by the same person.
2. Evidence of misleading our systems or users, such as techniques that obfuscate the actual location of an account, or that use fake personas to present themselves as someone they are not.
3. Evidence of attempt to manipulate or corrupt public debate to effect decision making, beliefs and opinions of our community.

We know that covert influence operations will continue to evolve in response to our detection and networks may attempt to reestablish a presence on our platform, which is why we continually seek to strengthen our policies and enforcement actions in order to protect our community against new types of harmful misinformation and inauthentic behaviors.