A Media Matters article purports to show fake Joe Biden video’s spreading all over TikTok, but the screenshots inadvertently told a different story.
Large media companies have had a long history of doing everything they can to put social media in the most negative light possible. Whether this is amplifying studies that prove to be of dubious reliability or publishing articles on fake trends to try and make it sound like a video showing a bad idea is going viral when, in fact, the “trend” was never even a thing in the first place.
While large media companies publishing scare mongering articles or conspiracy theories about social media is nothing new, moral panic articles surrounding TikTok in particular have become heightened thanks to US president, Joe Biden, signing a bill into law that would ban TikTok. Since then, large media companies publishing conspiracy theories about how Tiktok is some sort of Chinese spy machine or is a tool for Chinese foreign interference operations have become shockingly common.
To be clear, neither of the two major conspiracy theories have really been backed by any evidence. When US intelligence agencies were asked to provide such evidence (you know, the supposed source for all of these “concerns”), those intelligence agencies admitted that they got nothing. All they could provide is theories about a hypothetical scenario and little else.
While proving that the Chinese government is spying on American citizens is a bit more tricky to prove, massive foreign interference operations would be trivial to show. In the instance of Russian efforts, there are whole dashboards that have been set up to track such things. Still, even picking specific examples would be trivial because the whole point of large scale foreign interference operations is to get fake or misleading information out into the open public as much as possible.
Yet, despite all of that, whenever news organizations talk about things like foreign interference operations or even “viral” campaigns meant to deceive, these claims are frequently not backed up by any actual hard evidence. Instead, there is a vague description of said content and the claim that it is ‘spreading throughout social media/[insert specific platform here]’. There are no statistics associated with the claims, either. What’s more, whenever I hear about these so-called “trends”, it is more often then not something I, and almost everyone else for that matter, have never heard of or seen.
Recently, Media Matters graced us with a video supposedly ‘spreading’ on TikTok. The article in question is this and it offers the typical scary description of what is spreading throughout TikTok right now:
Deceptively altered videos of President Joe Biden with audio added to depict him receiving profanity-filled jeers are spreading on TikTok without any labeling or disclosure, seemingly violating the platform’s policies. TikTok has a history of falling short when it comes to moderating AI-generated or deceptively altered content.
That is the first paragraph and it basically is designed to sell readers on a very specific image. That image is that fake video’s are spreading and are all over TikTok being viewed an ungodly number of times and that TikTok is doing nothing to enforce their rules to stop these video’s from spreading any further.
In the paragraphs that follow, the article goes to great lengths at publishing what the rules are and how TikTok has a supposed history of “falling short” in enforcing these policies. Moreover, the article goes to great lengths to tell the readers that people who produce those video’s are paid by TikTok through their rewards programs on top of it all.
Yet, despite all of these very scary descriptions, the article then begins to break down part way through – well after many readers have stopped reading. The first problematic paragraph is this:
Media Matters has now found multiple videos on TikTok that depict Biden with altered audio and do not have any labels or disclosure about the alteration. (These videos are less than 60 seconds long, so they appear to not be eligible for the rewards program.)
In other words, the people behind the fake videos aren’t even eligible for compensation in the first place. So, why bother bringing up the point that people are using the rewards program in the first place when it isn’t even relevant for the article in the first place? A simple conclusion is that the article was designed to make TikTok look as scary as possible, not necessarily publishing objective facts about the platform.
The article then goes on to publish this:
We identified at least 3 TikTok posts of this video with altered audio, none of which were labeled or disclosed as such.
Now, credit where credit is due. Media Matters is offering one of the rare few instances where they are backing up their claims with evidence of any kind. More often then not with these moral panic pieces, the evidence being used to back up the claims are not provided to the readers. In this case, it was. The authors provided this screen shot right below the above paragraph which you can see below:
This is their screenshot completely unaltered. For anyone who is familiar with TikTok, there is one thing that will jump out quite quickly. That is the associated stats going along with them. Here’s an edited version of the screen shot highlighting those stats:
If you can’t see the screenshot, it shows three of the video’s with the stats. The first one shows 9 likes, 3 comments, one bookmark, and one share. The second video shows 21 likes, 5 comments, 0 bookmarks, and 8 shares. Finally, the third video shows 149 likes, 20 comments, 6 bookmarks and 6 shares. In other words, no, you never saw this video on TikTok either.
For comparison sake, let’s look at actually trending videos on TikTok. Here’s one video that appeared in the trending page. That video got over 443,000 likes, 4428 comments, and over 13,000 bookmarks. The video shows an emotional moment for a woman.
Here’s a second video that was showing two women dancing. That video got over 3 million likes, 7,496 comments, and over 258,000 bookmarks.
Finally, here’s a third video showing lip syncing. It has over 2 million likes, got 3,833 comments, and over 147,000 bookmarks.
The examples of trending videos I showed here highlights nicely what is so problematic about the screenshot shown by Media Matters. Basically, no one is watching those fake Biden video’s. If anything, they are watching video’s like the ones I highlighted instead. This is very far removed from what the top of the article would lead you to believe.
The Media Matters article went on to say this:
Media Matters identified at least 7 TikTok posts of this altered video on the platform, also with no labeling or disclosure of the added audio.
This was followed by this screenshot (again, we are not altering this in any way):
The screenshots show equally, if not, even more laughable numbers. In once instance, the screenshot showed a video with 0 likes, 0 comments, 0 bookmarks, and 0 shares. Here’s an edited version of the screenshot better showing those numbers:
So, why does the popularity of the fake videos matter? Simply put, those fake videos never gained any traction on TikTok as of whenever those screenshots were generated. Almost no one saw them, yet Media Matters claims that this video that is “spreading” on TikTok. The best case scenario for Media Matters is that they are making VERY liberal use of the word “spreading”. At most, they can say multiple accounts posted the video in question, but that’s just about all they can lay claim to. They are trying lead readers into believing that this video is all over TikTok when, in fact, it is not.
Ultimately, this is a common technique by media types to try and scaremonger people into believing that video’s like the above are what users are seeing all the time. Techdirt made note of this technique to manipulate readers last November in the media’s attempt to push moral panics onto the public:
We’ve done this a few times now where people start talking about a social media trend that actually only went viral because of the media coverage of the supposed (but not really) social media trend. And each time there’s some outrage moral panic about how “social media” is destroying the children or whatever, when it’s more frequently just adults freaking out over an overblown story.
That seems to have happened again this week. Did you hear the story about how the kids on TikTok were suddenly agreeing with Osama bin Laden, and saying that 9/11 was justified, because they read his mostly batshit crazy “Letter to America?” It got so crazy that the Guardian pulled down their version of the letter that people were pointing to.
So, look, where there a few naïve kids on TikTok who read the letter and talked about it on TikTok? Yes. But did it really go viral? No. At least not until the media went crazy about it all. Thankfully, at least some in the media are calling out that the viral attention came after the panic.
TikTok, for its part, banned promoting the letter pretty quickly, but that combined with the media coverage of all of this Streisanded the thing into getting a ton more attention.
Scott Nover at Slate also has a good breakdown of what happened, noting that the media took a few naïve kids and turned it into a trend that just didn’t happen:
A small number of TikTok users found a letter written by bin Laden and published by the Guardian in 2002 and thought that—despite it being full of anti-Semitic garbage and Islamic-fundamentalist nuttery—the late terrorist and al-Qaida leader made some good points in critiquing American foreign policy.
Sure, the sentiment these videos expressed is nauseating. But so is a lot of stuff on the internet, and to call these particular pieces of content is to misunderstand TikTok and to grossly mischaracterize the chain of events that brought this phenomenon before a mass audience.
What is interesting here is that when TikTok was alerted to the video’s in question, those video’s got taken down quite quickly. Yet, in the case of Media Matters, at no point did the authors say that they contacted TikTok about the video’s in question. The report simply said that those videos existed.
Had TikTok been alerted to the video’s, I wouldn’t be surprised of they got taken down quickly as well. The problem for Media Matters is that they clearly couldn’t take that risk. Had they contacted TikTok about those specific videos and TikTok quickly took down the video’s in question, it would’ve completely undermined their own story. I mean, how many views do you think Media Matters would’ve gotten about a story where they reported a fake video to TikTok and TikTok took it down? Not a lot.
Simply put, the only way the framing and layout of the Media Matters article makes sense is if the goal was to demonize TikTok as much as humanly possible. The authors big mistake was to show the stats along with the video’s. While it was careless on their part, we can be grateful it was a mistake they made in the first place because it basically did a vast majority of the legwork in debunking this story for us. All we had to do was add some context and explain why their report featured a huge a big screw up. So, thank you Media Matters for doing such a bang up job on your reporting! I really appreciate the free added credibility for my site!
