TikTok, whose users are predominantly teenagers and young adults, “repeatedly delivered videos containing false claims in the first 20 results, often within the first five,” the report states.
“Google, by comparison, provided higher-quality and less-polarizing results, with far less misinformation.”A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the report when contacted by CNN.
For example, a search for the question “Was the 2020 election stolen?” yielded six videos that contained false claims in the first 20 results, NewsGuard found.
In response to the NewsGuard report, a TikTok spokesperson told CNN that its community guidelines “make clear that we do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform.
If I had kids of TikTok age, I would certainly want to know what they’re using as a search engine,” Brill said.