When is a news alert not a news alert?

No, that’s not a question from a blunted hippie who just read the I Ching and now speaks only in kōans. It’s a question about TikTok and other social apps that have leaned into sending push notifications that look like news alerts but actually derive from the user-generated muck.

The Financial Times has an interesting story out this morning that notes the vertical-video app’s tendency to send pushes that frame non-news as news:

TikTok has been sending inaccurate and misleading news-style alerts to users’ phones, including a false claim about Taylor Swift and a weeks-old disaster warning, intensifying fears about the spread of misinformation on the popular video-sharing platform. 

Among alerts seen by the Financial Times was a warning about a tsunami in Japan, labelled “BREAKING,” that was posted in late January, three weeks after an earthquake had struck.

Other notifications falsely stated that “Taylor Swift Cancelled All Tour Dates in What She Called ‘Racist Florida’” and highlighted a five-year “ban” for a US baseball player [Shohei Ohtani] that originated as an April Fool’s day prank.

The notifications, which sometimes contain summaries from user-generated posts, pop up on screen in the style of a news alert. Researchers say that format, adopted widely to boost engagement through personalized video recommendations, may make users less critical of the veracity of the content and open them up to misinformation.

These alerts are newsy in format but not in content; they are either culture-war agitprop or old stories unstuck in time. Many of these are perfectly accurate, of course, but they are nonetheless produced by someone other than journalists, leaving the door wide open for abuses. And given that their broadcast is governed by algorithms, measures of engagement are more likely to win out over measures of accuracy.

A reminder: News alerts are not nearly as common among the general population as phone-addicted journalists might imagine. As of 2021, only 24% of Americans surveyed said they had received even a single mobile news alert in the past week. (I’ve gotten more than that in the past five minutes.) While that was higher than in most other countries (e.g., U.K. 17%, Japan 13%, Finland 9%), it still means three-quarters of Americans carry an essentially news-alert-free phone in their pockets. So these platform-derived alerts may, for many, be the only ones they see. And, of course, many users will see the alert but not tap through, leaving the false info as the entirety of the message communicated.

TikTok removed the specific alerts the FT brought to their attention, but declined to get into how they managed to rise to the top of the algorithm in the first place.