With more than 1.6 billion users globally, including over 200 million across Europe, TikTok has become a major space for political expression and information-sharing and a primary source of news for a significant share of young people. As a result, it has come under growing scrutiny from regulators and civil society. The European Commission opened formal proceedings in 2024 to examine whether TikTok is adequately assessing and mitigating systemic risks related to election integrity and civic discourse. We asked Francesca Scapolo, TikTok's Election Integrity Expert for Public Policy in Europe, how TikTok understands its responsibility for these risks in practice, how it cooperates with authorities, and what safeguards it has in place to protect democratic processes.

Given TikTok’s scale and its growing role as a source of political information for millions of users across the EU, how does the company approach accountability for systemic risks on the platform more broadly, such as the spread of disinformation, coordinated behaviour, or fake and inauthentic accounts? How do these efforts translate into cooperation with national authorities and EU institutions, particularly during sensitive moments like elections?

TikTok is a discovery platform where more than 200 million Europeans come to connect, share their passions, and find inspiration. We recognise that with scale comes responsibility, and we work continually to protect our platform and maintain a civil place for people to express themselves and build community, including during elections. We’ve invested significantly in systems, specialised teams and partnerships to address systemic risks such as harmful misinformation, fake and inauthentic accounts, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and deceptive behaviours.

Across the EU, our work includes proactive enforcement of our Community Guidelines, investment in features, tools and resources to empower our community, including media literacy initiatives, and partnerships with external experts. In fact, through TikTok's global fact-checking programme, we work closely with more than 20 IFCN-accredited fact-checking organisations, including AFP in France, DPA in Germany and Newtral in Spain.

Our technical and enforcement work is complemented by ongoing cooperation with national authorities and EU regulators. Under the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Code of Conduct on Disinformation, we engage with Digital Service Coordinators and the European Commission. We also provide regular updates on our content moderation efforts through our transparency reports.

During high‑stakes periods, such as elections, we also collaborate with national authorities and electoral commissions, and participate in the Code’s rapid response system, which enables swift, coordinated information-sharing between civil society organisations, fact‑checkers and platforms to address urgent or emerging threats, a critical capability during elections.

Taken together, these efforts demonstrate how we blend proactive risk mitigation, user‑empowering tools, and regulatory cooperation to help safeguard democratic discourse across the EU, especially during sensitive electoral moments.

From your perspective, are the measures TikTok currently has in place sufficient to address systemic risks to democratic processes during elections, particularly those linked to recommendation algorithms, visibility dynamics, and coordinated campaigns? Or do you see a need for stronger or more proactive safeguards?

During elections, we work continually to protect our platform and maintain a civil place for people to express themselves and build community. Thousands of trust and safety and security professionals have safeguarded TikTok through over 200 elections around the world over the last five years. Our comprehensive strategy is based on three key pillars:

• Protecting election integrity: Removing harmful misinformation, disrupting attempts to influence our community, including covert influence operations, collaborating with fact-checkers to assess content accuracy, and labelling unverifiable claims.

• Empowering users: Providing access to reliable information through Election Centres, enabling users to separate fact from fiction.

• Collaborating with experts: Partnering with electoral commissions and fact-checking organisations to counter emerging threats.

Through these efforts, in 2025, we disrupted more than 75 covert influence networks, and removed tens of thousands of accounts for violating our covert influence policies. We stay accountable to our community with regular updates on how we protect election integrity and frequent reports on the covert influence operations we have disrupted.

Looking ahead, we remain committed to strengthening these pillars and to evolving our safeguards as risks change.

Project Clover has been presented as a key pillar of TikTok’s European data-governance strategy, including a long-term investment of around EUR 12 billion, yet it remains relatively unknown to the public. How does this initiative concretely change how TikTok handles European user data, and what relevance does it have for election integrity and democratic safeguards in the EU?

Project Clover is one of the most advanced and comprehensive data protection programmes to be found anywhere. Its core tenets include storing European user data in a dedicated European enclave by default and putting additional safeguards and restrictions around that data, building on our existing controls on who can access data.

We've also engaged a respected European cybersecurity firm, NCC Group, to independently monitor and verify these safeguards. NCC Group's oversight provides third-party accountability over our work to protect European user data. We've also deployed tools to further protect European user privacy called 'privacy enhancing technologies'.

These measures go further than regulatory requirements, while being aligned with principles in the GDPR, and our general efforts towards safeguarding our platform and users through robust processes, policies, and procedures.

Francesca Scapolo oversees TikTok’s Europe-wide election integrity public policy efforts, coordinating among product, trust and safety, and policy teams. Collaborating with internal and external stakeholders, she implements regional public policy strategies that reinforce civic trust and safeguard electoral integrity. Before joining TikTok, she worked at the Meta Oversight Board and the European Commission.