Beware the 'New Google'

TikTok's search engine pumps toxic misinformation to its young users

- By Jack Brewster, Lorenzo Arvanitis, Valerie Pavilonis and Macrina Wang

Aloha, beloved, says a smiling young woman from her kitchen. About three, four days ago I made 'the cure'...to what's going around. It's actually called hydroxychloroquine, she explains. Hydroxychloroquine is the drug that ignited fierce debate soon after the coronavirus pandemic began. Following multiple studies, a broad consensus of medical experts, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, rejected claims that it could prevent or cure COVID-19 even as some, including then-President Donald Trump, continued to tout it.

The woman lifts up a plastic jug containing a murky yellow liquid. It's made out of grapefruit peel and lemon peel and it's slow simmered and it's supposed to 'cure' that, she continues. I'm telling you, hydroxychloroquine, quinine, can heal anything.

The video is the second one that appears when users search for hydroxychloroquine on TikTok. In the top 20 results for that search, four videos that pop up promote recipes for a do-it-yourself version of hydroxychloroquine, a prescription drug used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It can be produced safely only in controlled laboratory settings and is dangerous when not taken as prescribed.

Although the chef in the kitchen video never uses the word COVID, perhaps because that might attract TikTok's word-search-based content moderators, her promise that it can cure what's going around and can heal anything is clear.

A NewsGuard investigation found that TikTok's users, who are predominantly teens and young adults, are consistently fed false and misleading claims when they search on TikTok for information about prominent news topics.