Be there, will be wild!” A TikToker added “WHO’S GOING?” below. Worse, when paired with the lyrics “Let’s go to war!” the video serves as a galvanizing force potentially inciting violence.Īnother popular video set to “Go to War” features a Trump tweet: “Big protest in D.C. The creator’s intent doesn’t matter the result is the same: The audience is misled. Nonetheless, this image circulates widely online and is held up as evidence to fuel the voter fraud conspiracy organized under the banner #stopthesteal. The creator alleges he made the video to troll liberals, not to mislead. Those blue dots are the cities, where most of the population lives.
It depicts a map of the US made up of a smattering of small blue dots surrounded by a sea of red, and a caption: “THERE ARE NO ‘BLUE STATES’ NOT ONE!” Although the image is factual-it’s a county-by-county map of the 2020 election results-it lacks critical context. The most popular of these has nearly 2 million views alone. Many are accompanied by clips from the Capitol riots, supporters waving Trump flags, or screenshots of Trump’s tweets containing false claims about voter fraud. Released in 2017, the song has since been used as the soundtrack for more than 16,000 videos on TikTok. Many of these videos fall into a gray area that makes them difficult for moderation to address. Still, a large and growing segment of the platform creates and shares problematic messages that risk radicalizing users. While Parler prided itself on having little to no moderation, TikTok has moved aggressively to enforce community guidelines and take down content. Practical jokes and dance memes might be the dominant content, but just below the surface lurks a darker current infused with violence and hate that mirrors what we see on Parler, except here it has a much wider committed following.
We’ve also been monitoring TikTok for the past two years, as it grew from an entertaining novelty into a significant player capturing online attention share. Hickey leads the Algorithmic Transparency Institute at the National Conference on Citizenship. Parler was, and is, a dirty, disgusting place, but in terms of volume and reach, it was just a drop in the ocean.Ĭameron Hickey ( is an Emmy Award–winning broadcast journalist who spent 10 years producing science and technology stories for PBS NewsHour and NOVA. Our team at the National Conference on Citizenship has been monitoring content on Parler continuously for the past few months, and what we saw generally mirrors what others have reported: The platform was a hotbed of misinformation, conspiracy theories, hate, and incitements to violence. TikTok has more than 800 million active users across the world and 50 million in the US who log in every single day. At its apex, the temporarily deprovisioned Parler had fewer than 20 million accounts and peaked at just under 3 million daily active users. In the search for accountability, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube-the perennial havens for disinformation and radicalization-were joined on center stage by a younger fringe platform: Parler. Two months into trying to understand why a mob of angry protesters violently stormed the US Capitol, a significant influence remains overlooked: TikTok.