2024/07/17 by Francesco Corso, F Corso, Francesco Pierri +4 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.CY #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.12545
openalex publication_date 2024/07/17 · arxiv published 2024/07/17 · arxiv updated 2025/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
TikTok has skyrocketed in popularity over recent years, especially among younger audiences. However, there are public concerns about the potential of this platform to promote and amplify harmful content. This study presents the first systematic analysis of conspiracy theories on TikTok. By leveraging the official TikTok Research API we collect a longitudinal dataset of 1.5M videos shared in the U.S. over three years. We estimate a lower bound on the prevalence of conspiratorial videos (up to 1000 new videos per month) and evaluate the effects of TikTok's Creativity Program for monetization, observing an overall increase in video duration regardless of content. Lastly, we evaluate the capabilities of state-of-the-art open-weight Large Language Models to identify conspiracy theories from audio transcriptions of videos. While these models achieve high precision in detecting harmful content (up to 96%), their overall performance remains comparable to fine-tuned traditional models such as RoBERTa. Our findings suggest that Large Language Models can serve as an effective tool for supporting content moderation strategies aimed at reducing the spread of harmful content on TikTok.