When searching for content related to the Greens, a political party in Germany, TikTok search suggestions included “Habeck’s wife leaves,” which is a reference to Green Party leader and German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck. The suggestion was included despite there being no basis for the claim and no related videos found on TikTok.
“The suggestion hints at a gossip-like curiosity, based on the spreading of false information in order to obtain a seemingly newsworthy headline that has few political implications,” the researchers wrote in the report.
TikTok did not respond to how or why these search terms were suggested.
Other examples include promoting random clickbait search suggestions like “bisexual princess” when searching for the Social Democratic Party or alarmist suggestions like “Putin’s latest warning” when searching for the Greens.
Studies show that even if users don’t click on any of the search suggestions in the app, simply seeing the suggestions is enough to make the terms stick in their brains, and the more extreme the suggestions, the more likely they are to remember them.
In research conducted last year by Interface and AI Forensics, the group found that users who saw a series of search suggestions most often chose the most suggestive title available to click on. In one case, a title titled “Olaf Scholz caught in a club,” which was unrelated to any real incident and had no corresponding TikTok video, also became the fake title that most people remembered.
“People remember these gossip or clickbait headlines that are stored in the system without any video or content to back them up,” Degeling said. “We see this as evidence that search suggestions alone, regardless of whether there is a video related to them, really do stick in people’s minds.”
Research by Interface and AI Forensics found that 67 percent of TikTok users aged 18-25 in Germany used the in-app search function frequently, which is consistent with Adobe research published earlier this year which found that 40 percent of Americans use TikTok as a search engine now and that some Gen Z users trusted it more than Google. Search on TikTok is becoming an increasingly important way for users, particularly younger ones, to discover content on the app.
On TikTok, search suggestions appear in a number of locations, but for this study, researchers focused on results under the “Other Search Terms” option. This is a group of eight different search terms that appear below the initial results on the search page and, at first glance, appear to be linked to the search term that was just used.
TikTok said many factors contribute to determining whether a search term is recommended and what keywords are suggested, including comments and common searches made after watching a video.
Researchers found that TikTok had taken some steps to limit the spread of inaccurate or inflammatory search results for certain parties or politicians, but moderation efforts were not applied consistently across the platform.
The researchers also said their findings appear to show TikTok was employing a “blacklist,” because one in three search terms used for TK?! returned nothing in the “Other search terms” box. These terms spanned the political spectrum, from the AfD to the left-wing Free Democratic Party and the Greens.
TikTok told WIRED that it was “inaccurate to assume” that TikTok used a block list, but did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about how it chose which search terms returned blank results.
“If there is a policy of moderation, it is not consistent,” Romano says.
