TikTok is preparing for the next European elections, pledging to staff local language election centers for each of the 27 individual EU member states, which will include dedicated, vetted local voting information in the app.

As TikTok explains:

More than 134 million people in Europe use TikTok every month, most of whom will vote in this summer's European elections. Starting next month, we are introducing a local-language in-app Election Centre for all 27 individual EU Member States, so that users are easily able to distinguish between truth and falsehood. In collaboration with electoral commissions and civil society organisations on the ground, the in-app Election Centers will become trusted destinations for our community's access to authoritative and factual information.

TikTok unveiled last month a preview of the election center activations that focus on official voting information in order to fight potential misinformation around those subjects.
The platform has also vowed to battle misinformation directed towards influencing voters, dedicating over 6,000 employees to moderating content in the EU's diverse languages.

"Our teams work together with technology to ensure that we are consistently enforcing our rules to detect and remove misinformation, covert influence operations, and other content and behavior that can increase during an election period."

Especially in the context of TikTok, it is a profoundly vital project, as these links with the Chinese government have been one of the prior reasons that made users fear that these may put TikTok users under the control of CCP manipulative schemes. Already, there are various reports showing that, in some sense, TikTok was successful in some ways to dictate the flow of trends concerning the application towards the CCP choice and theoretically, this might reach up to the way it enhances particular aspects of the same while suppressing others to obtain the desired result.

In other words, nothing has been proven definitively to this point in regard to TikTok moderating content in line with Chinese Government requests. However, broader concerns about China's related influence operations, which continue to be uncovered in various other forms, do suggest that a Chinese-owned app could be a prime target for the same.

As such, TikTok should, wherever possible, prove its independence and political neutrality to avoid further scrutiny and potential restrictions based on such concerns.

TikTok reports that it is removing misinformation at a rate higher than ever before. It's also working with nine fact-checking organizations across Europe to verify the accuracy of content posted in 18 different European languages.

It is also utilizing the specialized teams to thwart manipulation of elections:
Deceptive actors sometimes try to tap into online platforms during elections. We have dedicated professionals whose work is to find, disrupt, and stay ahead of deceptive activity. We publish the removals of the covert influence networks within our quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement Reports. We will also make available dedicated covert influence operations reports over the next two months to further enhance transparency, accountability, and cross-industry sharing. We provide information about how we measure this behavior on our Transparency Center.

With generative AI, based on lessons learned from previous elections, we're going to see a broad swathe of influence operations across all social apps in 2024, which is going to test each platform's capacity to respond and mitigate misinformation leading into the polls.

And don't be fooled, there will certainly be more incidents via social applications that are going to impact voting behaviors, but hopefully with pre-emptive measures like this one, users will avoid falling into misleading approaches, thus letting such initiatives minimize their impact.

I mean, I kind of hope that is to be the case, but the challenge before social applications is enormous, and difficult to imagine all these avenues being closed down, let alone considering vested interests among owners of platforms.