TikTok, already under scrutiny over its Chinese ownership and threatened with a possible ban by U.S. President Donald Trump, is facing another major challenge: how to handle content around its first U.S. presidential election.

Originally known for teenagers’ viral dance routines and prank videos, Tiktok is now increasingly a destination for political content from its users. The hashtags Trump2020 and Biden2020 have collectively had more than 12 billion views on the app.

But TikTok’s head of U.S. safety Eric Han, in the first interview he has given about TikTok’s approach to election misinformation, told Reuters his team’s goal is to ensure the app can stay a place for entertainment and “silly self-expression.”

TikTok, which says it has about 100 million monthly active U.S. users, is charting its own approach to election-related material, factoring in what Han called the “cautionary tales” of more-established social media rivals.

TikTok fact-checking partners Lead Stories and PolitiFact said they have reviewed hundreds of videos containing political misinformation on the app, such as that Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris had threatened revenge on Trump supporters or about who appeared on disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs.

But unlike Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc, TikTok does not flag any misinformation to its users. Instead, the social media app keeps fact-checkers’ assessments internal and uses them to remove content, or, less frequently, reduce its reach.

“A lot of us have come from other platforms, we’ve seen how fact-checking works, we’ve seen how labeling works,” Han said, adding that the company was “very well aware” that fact-checking labels could backfire by making users double-down on inaccurate beliefs or assume all unlabeled content was legitimate.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-tiktok-misinformation-in/tiktok-faces-another-test-its-first-u-s-presidential-election-idUKKBN2682PL