Mental health content on TikTok had the lowest misinformation rate at 31%. Wellness and self-care videos were slightly worse at 37%, while advice about chronic illness was false or misleading 39% of the time. More views also doesn’t equate to more reliable information—videos with more than 5 million views were found to be 14% more likely to spread false information than those with fewer than 1 million views.

With 17% of Americans trusting TikTok as much as they do doctors, and 7% trusting the platform even more than they do medical professionals, the consequences are potentially serious. Given that nearly half of U.S. TikTok users are under 30, the app becomes a perfect storm for misleading advice targeting a young and impressionable audience. There’s also no easy way to verify whether these so-called experts have the credentials they claim, leaving users to rely on unvetted information.

Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu has millions of likes on TikTok and hundreds of thousands of followers. He ran a successful social media campaign to emerge victorious in the first round of the country's presidential elections.

"We have now a TikTok messiah or something like that. Very successful. And we are ot sure if he will be able to win in the second round."

Attorneys general from 13 states and the District of Columbia are alleging in a series of lawsuits that TikTok violated local consumer protection laws by designing its wildly popular video-sharing app in ways that lead to compulsive use, exposing young users to mental and physical risk. And they claim the company, which is owned by China-based tech giant ByteDance, has misled the public about how safe its platform is for children.

While it is unclear when the appeals court will make its decision, the two sides have requested an expedited ruling by December, to allow time for a potential appeal to be filed with the Supreme Court before the sale-or-ban deadline of Jan. 19.

“It was incumbent upon us to bring action now to stop dangerous behavior from happening as soon as possible,” Schwalb said.

The suit, which was joined by the Federal Trade Commission, said it was aimed at putting an end "to TikTok's unlawful massive-scale invasions of children's privacy."

The search tool would have allowed ByteDance and TikTok employees 'to collect bulk user information based on the user's content or expressions, including views on gun control, abortion, and religion,' a DOJ official said. The filing did not indicate how or if the data was used.

Social media companies, like Meta's Facebook, also ask users to share their religion and other personal information. However the DOJ alleges that TikTok's access to sensitive information could cause geopolitical risks, by allowing the Chinese government to demand ByteDance share U.S. users' data.

DOJ officials also argued against TikTok's First Amendment defense, saying any damage from the law to users' speech freedoms would be 'incidental.'

'Any adverse effects on expression by U.S. persons are indirect and amply justified,' officials said. TikTok creators, they added later, 'have no First Amendment right to TikTok.'

Like everyone else here, TikTok wanted to show off its new AI products . At a press conference, a top executive from its parent company, ByteDance, rolled out a fascinating and unsettling new feature that allows users to create realistic AI avatars that can say and do… pretty much anything in any language.

TikTok said the account of reality TV star Paris Hilton was also targeted, but it was not compromised.

Ms Hilton, who has more than 10 million followers on TikTok, is an active user of the platform.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump joined TikTok, despite attempting to ban it on national security grounds during his presidency.

Here in Taiwan, lawmakers say, they do not have the luxury of thinking of TikTok as the only threat. Disinformation reaches Taiwanese internet users on every type of social media, from chat rooms to short videos.

But the most widely used platforms have foreign owners, and TikTok is not the only one. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, operated by publicly traded U.S. companies, are even more popular than TikTok in Taiwan. And Line, a messaging app owned by a Japanese subsidiary of the South Korean internet giant Naver, is commonly used in the country as a news source and way to make payments.

When Taiwan went to the polls in January, multiple organizations and government agencies were on call to make sure the conversation on TikTok stuck to the facts. When Taiwan went to the polls in January, multiple organizations and government agencies were on call to make sure the conversation on TikTok stuck to the facts.

But some worry that this made it easier for pro-China views to spread on TikTok, and that Taiwan’s approach to regulating social media is not robust enough to confront the persistent threat of foreign influence online.

'In the U.S., the target is very clear ' this one platform - but in Taiwan, we don't know where the enemy is,' Ms. Chiu said. 'It's not just a cross-strait issue, but a domestic one.'