TikTok released its latest outline of its efforts at election integrity during the recently-concluded period for elections in the EU, and the impact of its various measures, in place to limit misinformation and keep voters informed during the process.

Which might be seen as a lead-in to the next U.S. Election, and how TikTok plans to address the similar issues in America. And with 170 million U.S. users, and both Presidential candidates making TikTok a focus, TikTok could indeed play an important role within the broader campaign.

First, on content removals, and violations of its election integrity rules. TikTok reports that it removed 2,600 pieces of content for violating its election policies, as well as more than 43,000 pieces of content for violating its misinformation rules in the four weeks leading up to and during the election.

TikTok says:

"We removed over 96% of violating misinformation content proactively before it ever had to be reported to us; we removed more than 80% before it ever saw a single view in that period."

TikTok also worked with local fact-checking teams on detecting and removing violative content.

These partners provided support for our work on proactive surfacing and flagging of potential misinformation, verification of content and contribution to a repository of factchecked claims, and also in-app interventions. We also worked together with the fact-checkers in developing media literacy videos.

Processes of working with fact-checkers-many see this as hewing closely to Government censorship-plays a crucial role in flagging the potential issues, ensuring accuracy, and it's therefore important that platforms do seek to continue working with outside verification partners to maximize their efforts in this respect.

Of particular concern among the misinformation campaigns TikTok says it discovered during the EU election period were those seeking to amplify fears around migration, climate change and security and defence, and LGBT rights.
 It is worth noting, too here, that TikTok says it has over 6,000 people working on moderating EU-language content "so we can take action against content and behaviors that breach our rules."
While that's nearly a quarter of that, X has only 1,849 human moderators covering the same. The platform formerly known as Twitter is also smaller by user count, but with state-funded disinformation pushes already targeting it, that does stand out as a potential concern for the coming U.S. election.

TikTok also claims that its dedicated in-app Election Centers, one on each app in every country of the EU, were viewed more than 7.5 million times in the month leading up to each respective election.

These are some good indicators for TikTok as regards its broader efforts to protect users and strengthen civic integrity. Of course, we can only go on the reported numbers; we do not know how many additional misinformation programs might have gone undetected. But the measures here are important steps, which all platforms will need to implement in future campaigns.