TikTok CEO EMPHASIZED That His Social Media Did Not Take Profit From The Election

JAKARTA - Soon Indonesia will enter the General Election (Pemilu) year, and to prevent the spread of false information, TikTok stated that it had made efforts to prevent hate speech and hoaxes.

"We have undergone several electoral cycles in many countries and we have learned a lot and collaborated to ensure that we preserve integrity. We are responsible for providing a platform for expression and discussion on TikTok," said TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at the TikTok Southeast Asia Impact Forum Report 2023, in Jakarta, Thursday, June 15.

Chew stated that it had created an Election Center by increasing resources to dispel all kinds of false information.

"The Election Center is aimed at identifying and removing hate speech, dangerous misinformation, as well as maintaining freedom of expression so that people can express themselves. Now at the same time, as a platform, our mission is to inspire creativity," said Chew.

Cheat admitted, TikTok is indeed a forum for expression and discussion, however, he emphasized that its platform has not yet received Election or political-based advertisements.

"We know we are an important platform for expression and discussion but at the same time, we don't want to take advantage of any of these election cycles. So as a policy issue globally, we don't take political ads, as a platform," said Chew.

"So there is a lot of work we do but, what we care about is the integrity of the platform," he added.

For your information, TikTok has been claimed to be a hotbed of misinformation. A new study by NewsGuard last year found that the platform had a lot of misinformation about serious topics.

While searching for prominent news in September 2022, fact-checking organizations found misinformation in nearly 20 percent of the videos displayed by the application search engine.

A total of 540 TikTok videos were analyzed as part of this investigation, with 105 found to contain false or misleading claims, quoted from Mashable.

NewsGuard said searches on topics ranging from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to shootings at schools and COVID vaccines, TikTok users were consistently claimed to be false and misleading.