Comelec, TikTok partner to fight disinformation gearing up to 2025 polls

The Commission on Elections (Comelec) and social media platform TikTok on Tuesday inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the aim to prevent the spread of disinformation amid the upcoming midterm elections in May.
Under the partnership, the two parties will collaborate on the creation of in-app resources to ensure awareness, and will grant Comelec access to a Tiktok safety enforcement tool, which will facilitate the reporting of content violative of local election laws.
The partnership also aims to flag disinformation, misinformation, and content posted on the TikTok platform.
“You see, the 2025 election is definitely an offshoot of what will happen in the near future, specially the presidential and vice presidential election,” Comelec chairman George Garcia said during a briefing following the signing in Taguig City.
“If we can weed out now the undesirables in social media using the platform of Tiktok, then we can surely do that here in 2025, we can do that in 2028,” he added.
For its part, TikTok said it already implements guidelines that do not allow political advertising or videos that generate revenue on its platform.
“Our policy is that we ban political advertising on TikTok. What this means is that governments, politicians, and political parties are not allowed to make money on TikTok,” Philippine public policy manager Peachy Paderna said.
“We do this because we believe that this kind of advertising does not contribute to making TikTok a safe and creative and civil space for our users,” she added.
Paderna said TikTok also employs machine systems and human reviewers, along with community reports, to ensure that content on the platform is reliable. It has also partnered with 21 parties across the globe to fact check content.
“We label information that is unverifiable or unverified, so these are the measures that we’re taking and we’re gonna continue doing that across the election cycle and beyond,” she said. — BM, GMA Integrated News