Toxic TikTok: Popular social-media video app feeds vaccine misinformation to kids within minutes after they sign up
‘He gets the va**ine and he dies after three days! What do you think?’
By Alex Cadier and Melissa Goldin
Additional reporting by Chine Labbé, Virginia Padovese, and Katharina Stahlhofen
Welcome back to NewsGuard’s Misinformation Monitor, our newsletter tracking misinformation with exclusive data from five countries. Sign up to get the Misinformation Monitor in your inbox or download NewsGuard for your browser.

TikTok feeds false and dangerous information about COVID-19 to children as young as nine years old quickly after they sign up for the platform, with little or no warnings, an investigation by NewsGuard found.
The short-form video-sharing app, which is especially popular with children under 18, served up false and misleading COVID-19 claims within minutes to nine children recruited by NewsGuard and carefully supervised by their parents or other adult relatives. The barrage of toxic content — including videos asserting that the vaccines are deadly and that COVID-19 is a genocide conspiracy — came even though some of the children did not follow a single account or search for specific kinds of information.
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