Dark Money Influencers Are Placing Political Ads on TikTok, Mozilla Says

Sarah Favot

Favot is an award-winning journalist and adjunct instructor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She previously was an investigative and data reporter at national education news site The 74 and local news site LA School Report. She's also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News. She was a Livingston Award finalist in 2011 and holds a Master's degree in journalism from Boston University and BA from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

Dark Money Influencers Are Placing Political Ads on TikTok, Mozilla Says

When TikTok proudly announced in 2019 that it would ban political advertisements on its platform, the social networking service was met with widespread praise. At a time when Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram refused to take a stand against political powers, many praised TikTok's commitment to neutrality.

Yet two years later, it's clear TikTok has succumbed to those forces as well: A report published Thursday by Mozilla suggests that misleading political ads and "dark money" have seeped onto the app.


A team of Mozilla researchers found that TikTok influencers in the U.S. are "being paid by political organizations to post content espousing their views," and that not all of these posts are disclosed as paid partnerships.

The report, titled "Th€se Are Not Po£itical Ad$: How Partisan Influencers Are Evading TikTok's Weak Political Ad Policies," charges TikTok with lax oversight and policies that contain loopholes that have enabled these posts to appear.

"TikTok does not effectively monitor and enforce its rule that creators must disclose paid partnerships," the researchers wrote, "nor does the platform proactively label sponsored posts as advertisements."

In response to the Mozilla report, TikTok released a statement on Thursday saying, "Political advertising is not allowed on TikTok, and we continue to invest in people and technology to consistently enforce this policy and build tools for creators on our platform. As we evolve our approach, we appreciate feedback from experts, including researchers at the Mozilla Foundation, and we look forward to a continuing dialogue as we work to develop equitable policies and tools that promote transparency, accountability and creativity."

TikTok Political AdsImage courtesy of Mozilla

The use of political ads on social media drew attention following the 2016 presidential election when it was revealed that Russia weaponized social platforms by spreading misinformation in an attempt to influence the election. Facebook banned political ads after the 2020 election "to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day," but lifted the ban in March.

TikTok, however, said in 2019 that political advertising did not fit the app's "light-hearted and irreverent" experience. The Mozilla report suggests that TikTok has not only failed in this promise, but has eschewed the transparency mechanisms in place that other platforms have adopted in the wake of the attention on the dangers of political ads.

Mozilla found that several right-wing TikTok influencers appear to be funded by Turning Point USA, a tax-exempt nonprofit which has a dedicated influencer program intended to fund conservative content creators on social media.

The report points to one post by a TikTok user with 67,000 followers that appears to have been recorded at a Turning Point USA conference. The post features the hashtags #tpusa and #trump2020, and includes images of people in red Make America Great Again hats and holding Trump flags. It does not include a hashtag that indicates it is sponsored content.

Image courtesy of Mozilla

On the other end of the political spectrum, Mozilla pointed to a report by Reuters that found influencers were paid by a progressive PAC, The 99 Problems, to create pro-Biden TikTok posts without disclaimers.

According to the Mozilla researchers, TikTok doesn't enforce its rule that creators must disclose paid partnerships and it doesn't "proactively" label sponsored posts, saying it "doesn't seem to monitor influencer advertising."

Mozilla queried the TikTok Application Programming Interface to see the metadata associated with each TikTok post. Posts with advertiser-funded hashtag challenges were marked as advertising in the metadata, whereas influencer posts that used the hashtag #ad or #sponsored were not.

Like other social media services, the Federal Trade Commission requires advertising disclosures for social media influencers by using the hashtag #ad. Mozilla says other platforms are better at monitoring these advertisements by offering influencers "straightforward" ways to disclose their partnerships like checking a box on YouTube, disclosing the post is a sponsored video. Instagram also has a tool creators can use to mark their content as branded. (TikTok also differs from other social media platforms in that it doesn't have a publicly-searchable database of advertising data.)

"Of course, it's hard to know exactly how self-disclosure ad policies are being enforced across platforms but TikTok is significantly far behind Instagram and YouTube when it comes to providing tools and enacting clear, strict, and transparent policies," the Mozilla researchers wrote in the report.

The Mozilla researchers made recommendations to TikTok to address these issues it uncovered, such as developing mechanisms for creators to disclose paid partnerships, introducing an ad database that includes paid partnerships, and updating its policies and enforcement processes on political advertisements to ensure they address all ways that paid political influence occurs on the platform.

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'Open Letter' Proposing 6-Month AI Moratorium Continues to Muddy the Waters Around the Technology

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
'Open Letter' Proposing 6-Month AI Moratorium Continues to Muddy the Waters Around the Technology
Evan Xie

AI continues to dominate the news – not just within the world of technology, but mainstream news sources at this point – and the stories have entered a by-now familiar cycle. A wave of exciting new developments, releases and viral apps is followed by a flood of alarm bells and concerned op-eds, wondering out loud whether or not things are moving too fast for humanity’s own good.

With OpenAI and Microsoft’s GPT-4 arriving a few weeks ago to massive enthusiasm, we were overdue for our next hit of jaded cynicism, warning about the potentially dire impact of intuitive chatbots and text-to-image generators.

Sure enough, this week, more than 1,000 signatories released an open letter calling for all AI labs to pause training any new systems more powerful than GPT-4 for six months.

What does the letter say?

The letter calls out a number of familiar concerns for anyone who has been reading up on AI development this past year. On the most immediate and practical level, it cautions that chatbots and automated text generators could potentially eliminate vast swathes of jobs previously filled by humans, while “flood[ing] our information channels with propaganda and untruth.” The letter then continues into full apocalypse mode, warning that “nonhuman minds” could eventually render us obsolete and dominate us, risking “loss of control of our civilization.”

The six-month break, the signatories argue, could be used to jointly develop shared safety protocols around AI design to ensure that they remain “safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” They also suggest that AI developers work in collaboration with policymakers and politicians to develop new laws and regulations around AI and AI research.

The letter was signed by several AI developers and experts, along with tech industry royalty like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. TechCrunch does point out that no one from inside OpenAI seems to have signed it, nor Anthropic, a group of former OpenAI developers who left to design their own “safer” chatbots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did speak to the Wall Street Journal this week in reference to the letter, noting that the company has not yet started work on GPT-5 and that time for safety tests has always been built into their development process. He referred to the letter’s overall message as “preaching to the choir.”

Critics of the letter

The call for an AI ban was not without critics, though. Journalist and investor Ben Parr noted that the vague language makes it functionally meaningless, without any kind of metrics to gauge how “powerful” an AI system has become or suggestions for how to enforce a global AI ban. He also notes that some signatories, including Musk, are OpenAI and ChatGPT competitors, potentially giving them a personal stake in this fight beyond just concern for the future of civilization. Others, like NBC News reporter Ben Collins, suggested that the dire AI warnings could be a form of dystopian marketing.

On Twitter, entrepreneur Chris Pirillo noted that “the genie is already out of the bottle” in terms of AI development, while physicist and author David Deutsch called out the letter for confusing today’s AI apps with the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems still only seen in sci-fi films and TV shows.

Legitimate red flags

Obviously, the letter speaks to relatively universal concerns. It’s easy to imagine why writers would be concerned by, say, BuzzFeed now using AI to write entire articles and not just quizzes. (The website isn’t even using professional writers to collaborate with and copy-edit the software anymore. The new humans helping out “Buzzy the Robot” to compose its articles are non-editorial employees from the client partnership, account management, and product management teams. Hey, it’s just an “experiment,” freelancers!)

But it does once more raise some red flags about the potentially misleading ways that some in the industry and the media are discussing AI, which continues to make these kinds of high-level discussions around the technology more cumbersome and challenging.

A recent viral Twitter thread credited ChatGPT-4 with saving a dog’s life, leading to a lot of breathlessly excited coverage about how computers were already smarter than your neighborhood veterinarian. The owner entered the dog’s symptoms into the chatbot, along with copies of its blood work, and ChatGPT responded with the most common potential ailments. As it turns out, a live human doctor tested the animal for one of the bot’s suggested illnesses and accurately guessed the diagnosis. So the computer is, in a very real sense, a hero.

Still, considering what might be wrong with dogs based on their symptoms isn’t what ChatGPT does best. It’s not a medical or veterinary diagnostic tool, and it doesn’t have a database of dog ailments and treatments at the ready. It’s designed for conversations, and it’s just guessing as to what might be wrong with the animal based on the texts on which it was trained, sentences and phrases that it has seen connected in human writing in the past. In this case, the app guessed correctly, and that’s certainly good news for one special pupper. But there’s no guarantee it would get the right answer every time, or even most of the time. We’ve seen a lot of evidence that ChatGPT is perfectly willing to lie, and can’t actually tell the difference between truth and a lie.

There’s also already a perfectly solid technology that this person could have used to enter a dog’s symptoms and research potential diagnoses and treatments: Google search. A search results page also isn’t guaranteed to come up with the correct answer, but it’s as if not more reliable in this particular use case than ChatGPT-4, at least for now. A quality post on a reliable veterinary website would hopefully contain similar information to the version ChatGPT pulled together, except it would have been vetted and verified by an actual human expert.

Have we seen too many sci-fi movies?

A response published in Time by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky – long considered a thought leader in the development of artificial general intelligence – argues that the open letter doesn’t go far enough. Yudkowsky suggests that we’re currently on a path toward “building a superhumanly smart AI,” which will very likely result in the death of every human being on the planet.

No, really, that’s what he says! The editorial takes some very dramatic turns that feel pulled directly from the realms of science-fiction and fantasy. At one point, he warns: “A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.” This is the actual plot of the 1995 B-movie “Virtuosity,” in which an AI serial killer app (played by Russell Crowe!) designed to help train police officers grows his own biomechanical body and wreaks havoc on the physical world. Thank goodness Denzel Washington is around to stop him.

And, hey, just because AI-fueled nightmares have made their way into classic films, that doesn’t mean they can’t also happen in the real world. But it nonetheless feels like a bit of a leap to go from text-to-image generators and chatbots – no matter how impressive – to computer programs that can grow their own bodies in a lab, then use those bodies to take control of our military and government apparatus. Perhaps there’s a direct line between the experiments being done today and truly conscious, self-aware, thinking machines down the road. But, as Deutsch cautioned in his tweet, it’s important to remember that AI and AGI are not necessarily the exact same thing.

Will EVGo’s Stock Surges Be Enough To Keep the Company Stable?

David Shultz

David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.

Will EVGo’s Stock Surges Be Enough To Keep the Company Stable?
Image from EVGo

Shares of EVgo are up over 20% today after the company released Q4 earnings that outpaced predictions from Wall Street. Analysts had predicted the company would announce a loss per share in the neighborhood of $0.16-$0.18, but the Los Angeles-based electric vehicle charging company reported a much more meager loss, to the tune of just $0.06 per share.

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AgTech Startup Leaf is Helping Farmers Brace for Unexpected Rainfall After Record Year

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

green leaf drawing and rolling farm lands
Evan Xie

At least 50,000 acres in the state of California are estimated to be underwater after a record-breaking year of rainfall. So far this year, California has received nearly 29 inches of rain, with the bulk being dumped on its central and southern coasts. Farmers are already warning that the price of dairy, tomatoes and other vegetables will rise as the weather prevents them from re-seeding their fields.

While no current technology can prevent weather disasters, Leaf Agriculture, a Los Angeles-based startup that launched in 2018, wants to help farmers better manage their properties by leveraging data.

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