TikTok’s data disclosure shows how social media is a Petri dish for disinformation
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Symbols are important for protest movements. They convey a message that is central to the cause. The peace sign, popularised by US anti-war activists in the 1960s, was originally designed in 1958 for the British nuclear disarmament movement. The distinctive vertical and diagonal lines represent the semaphore signal for the letters “N” and “D” — or nuclear disarmament.
More recently, in 2014, pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong adopted the umbrella as their symbol to express how their movement used this everyday item to protect themselves from tear gas projectiles thrown at them by police.
What message, then, does a gallows convey? In Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, pro-Trump protesters erected a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Pretty clear message. Outside the Dáil on September 20 protesters here similarly erected a gallows accompanied with photos of elected representatives. How did we get here?
Last week we learned that TikTok recently took action against a “covert influence operation,” as they labelled it, made up of a network of 72 inauthentic accounts with just over 94,000 followers. TikTok said this network was operated by individuals in Ireland and targeted Irish users by “hyper-posting” content and comments “with divisive views related to nationalism” to “intensify social conflict” in Ireland and other countries.
Let’s break that down. Hyper-posting means spamming, essentially, and what we seem to have here is a cluster of accounts that tried to hide their identities and worked together to spam TikTok with content focused on manipulating opinions and increasing divisions around nationalism. Fomenting polarisation, in other words.
It’s likely this network tried to achieve this by posting or promoting false, misleading or inflammatory claims. This marks the first explicit disclosure by a social media company of a disinformation network operating in Ireland.
In reality, most of us already recognise that social media has become a Petri dish for disinformation at home and abroad. The events of January 6 in DC show where this can lead.
Up to 200 protesters gathered outside the Dáil on September 20 to demonstrate against a wide range of grievances they believe represent an existential crisis for this country. Many showed up to protest peacefully, as is their right, whatever the cause. What united those present however was their support for unsubstantiated, unverified and conspiratorial narratives.
These issues included the belief that “military-aged male” migrants are being deliberately brought into Ireland to replace our native population, claims that covid vaccines have caused masses of people to die suddenly, and suspicions that updated relationship and sex education on our school curriculums are part of a concerted agenda to target and pervert young people.
The promotion of these claims is not confined to the darker recesses of the internet. They are easily accessible on places like Telegram but also TikTok, Facebook and X (or Twitter). Community guidelines designed by platforms to prohibit misleading or harmful content and protect users are often not enforced, as we’ve documented in our analysis at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an NGO that researches online extremism, disinformation and hate.
In the weeks leading up to September 20, extremist figureheads within this movement published messages on the same online spaces listed above that urged “all the patriots” in Ireland to join their “call to the Dáil” and stand together against the “demons,” “rats” and “traitors” in Leinster House.
There are many offline, real-world factors that contribute to people becoming supportive of such perspectives but what the Dáil protests illustrate, and TikTok’s data disclosure confirms, is that social media ecosystems are being used to infect people and affect society. The harmful consequences of disinformation and its threat to democracy are plain to see.
TikTok released this data as part of its commitment to the European Commission’s 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation, alongside companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft. The code is voluntary but backed up by the Digital Services Act (DSA), a sweeping piece of legislation recently enacted by the EU that aims to compel platforms to act against the spread of disinformation, illegal content, hate speech and share their algorithms publicly.
The increased transparency brought about by this legislation will be beneficial for everyone. The DSA includes safeguards that aim to protect people’s fundamental freedom of expression. People must always be free to access whatever information attracts or intrigues them, providing it’s legal.
What we must push back on are the online ecosystems that permit and incentivise toxic and harmful ideas, contribute to radicalisation and incite people towards violence, as we are witnessing more and more in this country. Ireland is not immune to this form of extremism.
When you become intoxicated with the belief that you are on the side of good, battling evil, and this narrative is reinforced to you endlessly everyday in an information environment that is flooded with unchallenged lies and a grab bag of hateful nonsense, it’s not a long walk from labelling someone a traitor to erecting a gallows to send a clear and concise message of intent to that “traitor.”
- Ciaran O’Connor is an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, working in the Research and Policy unit. He specialises in using open-source research to track and monitor disinformation and extremism online, with a particular focus on far-right activity and communication across open and closed networks and platforms.