Today, native advertising and discovery platform Taboola announced a new product feature aimed at combating misinformation shared on TikTok and other social media.
Updates from Taboola News advise reliable news sources through publishing partners, as well as working directly with device manufacturers like Samsung.
Read next: TikTok is making ground rules for social media
What it does . Taboola News can now be installed by manufacturers on mobile device wallpapers, while also providing users with news recommendations directly on the mobile lock screen. Recommendations from trusted publishers can also be delivered via browser notifications that refresh throughout the day. The product is now available in 80 markets worldwide.
Demand for news. News ratings service Newsguard found that eight out of nine people under the age of 18 were exposed to misinformation about COVID-19 last year. The first 35 minutes of a TikTok session. According to TikTok’s own findings, 60 percent of videos with harmful misinformation this year were viewed by TikTok users before the content was removed.
Why do we care. Platforms like TikTok are designed to grow their audience and keep them watching videos, which reduces the time spent consuming other content like news. Therefore, news publishers need a way to gain more readers. And, oddly enough, the presence of fake news on TikTok and social media suggests that users of these platforms do have some desire to be informed.
By pushing news recommendations to the mobile device lock screen, some accurate news is more likely to reach users first.
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About the author
Chris Wood has over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and reporter. At DMN, he served as an associate editor, providing original analysis for the growing field of marketing technology. He interviewed leaders in technology and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, who was named America’s first federal CIO by Barack Obama. He is particularly interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel discussion on “Innovation Theater” at the Fintech Inn in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused coverage on industry sectors such as Robotics Trends, The Age of Modern Breweries, and AdNation News, Wood writes for KIRKUS and writes fiction, criticism, and poetry for several leading book bloggers. He studied English at Fairfield University and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.
