In the run-up to the June European Parliamentary elections, the ByteDance-owned social media platform TikTok announced Wednesday that it will be intensifying its efforts to combat fake news and covert influence operations by launching a local language app in each of the 27 countries in the EU.

According to Tiktok, the individual local language “election centers” are an extension of the work that was initiated in 2021 and intensified last year during the elections in Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain.

The purpose of the app is to educate Europeans about the political process in their nations and their economic bloc.

Politicians and governments everywhere are worried about the dissemination of misinformation, the use of deepfakes produced by AI to deceive and sway elections, and the impact of social media platforms on voter preferences in particular.

According to the firm, nearly 30% of MPs in the European Parliament use TikTok.

Head of Trust & Safety EMEA at TikTok, Kevin Morgan, wrote in a blog post, “Next month, we will launch a local language Election Centre in-app for each of the 27 individual EU member states to ensure people can easily separate fact from fiction.”

“Working with local electoral commissions and civil society organisations, these Election Centres will be a place where our community can find trusted and authoritative information,” he stated.

In the past, during national elections, the company collaborated with news checkers to create instructional movies regarding the electoral process and disinformation spread through election centers.

According to Morgan, TikTok intends to start nine more media literacy initiatives this year and grow its network of fact-checking organizations. The app presently collaborates with nine fact-checking organizations in Europe.

In the upcoming months, it will launch specialized reports on covert influence efforts as it seeks to improve accountability and transparency.