TikTok will now warn you about videos with questionable information

  • TikTok will start displaying warnings on videos that contain questionable information that couldn’t be verified by fact-checkers
  • The platform will also begin warning users when they go to re-share those videos that the information hasn’t been confirmed
  • The app will now display a warning label on these videos that reads, “Caution: Video flagged for unverified content”
  • This means a fact-checker looked at the content but wasn’t able to certify that it was right or wrong. 
  • TikTok has already made attempts to reduce the spread of some unverified videos, but they weren’t publicly flagged before today
  • Creators will now get a message when a warning label is added to their video, and those videos will all have their distribution reduced
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  • For information regarding misinformation online, read our recent article here

TikTok: Fake Lincoln school ‘audition’ site removed

  • A fake primary school TikTok profile inviting pupils to send “audition” videos has been removed, the firm said
  • The bogus site used the school logo of Westgate Academy in Lincoln and asked pupils to send clips of themselves in uniform
  • TikTok said it had shut down the page “for violating our rules around impersonation”
  • The school’s head teacher James Kelwick said he was “relieved and happy” that the site had gone
  • Mr Kelwick wrote to parents about the site, describing it as a safeguarding risk
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Teacher removed from teaching register after bombarding student with intimate messages

  • A senior woman teacher has been struck off after sending ‘increasingly intimate’ messages to an underage pupil
  • Teaching watchdogs have now banned the teacher, aged 48, from the classroom after the incident at Heston Community School in Hounslow, where she was the head of Year 7, the pastoral lead and a learning coordinator
  • She also introduced the vulnerable 15-year-old to a stranger outside school late at night – suggesting he could help ‘mentor’ the teenager
  • It came after a similar incident in 2010 where she allowed a teenager stay in her home who had been excluded from school and reported missing to police
  • A Teaching Regulation Agency hearing in Coventry heard how she formed an ‘inappropriately close’ relationship with the vulnerable pupil in 2017
  • Banning her from the classroom with the right of appeal in three years, decision maker Sarah Buxcey, for the Education Secretary, said: ‘The panel considered that [the offender] did not show meaningful remorse for or insight into her action
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Police plan 5 more arrest phases in tackling child abuse in West Yorkshire

  • Police investigating historic grooming cases in West Yorkshire have revealed that no fewer than five more “arrest phases” are expected this year alone
  • Work continies apace on Operation Dalesway – a police initiative set up specifically to investigate claims of historic Child Sex Exploitation (CSE)
  • Superintendent Richard Padwell informed the latest meeting of Bradford Council’s children’s services scrutiny committee of imminent developments and said this year, “we expect there to be five arrest phases”
  • Police have handed over files to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in relation to a number of child abuse cases
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