Social media platform TikTok is hosting multiple videos that spread misinformation and falsehoods about the coronavirus, despite a policy change concerning misinformation that the platform announced earlier this month. The videos have hundreds of thousands of views combined, and there even appears to be an auto search suggestion leading to some of these videos.

TikTok, a video platform that has increasingly featured misinformation and conspiracy theories, announced a major update to its community guidelines this month. The revised guidelines include a section on “misleading information,” which states that the platform does “not permit misinformation that could cause harm to our community or the larger public” and that it will “remove misinformation that could cause harm to an individual's health or wider public safety.” The guidelines also say that TikTok will bar videos with “misinformation meant to incite fear, hate, or prejudice” and those with “misinformation that may cause harm to an individual's health, such as misleading information about medical treatments.”

Despite the new policy, a search by Media Matters found multiple videos on TikTok spreading baseless claims and debunked conspiracy theories about an ongoing public health crisis -- the coronavirus outbreak that reportedly originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Specifically, the platform has hosted multiple videos baselessly claiming that the virus was purposely created by the government to wipe people out. In one video, which received at least 8,000 “likes” and 32,000 views, the person speculated that “every 100 years, the government spreads these diseases into animals for population control.” (Media Matters is not linking to videos created by minors to protect their identities.)

Other videos with thousands of combined views made similar claims, such as featuring text saying that “the Chinese government” was “starting a virus as a way for population control” or claiming the outbreak was “really a government biochemical attack” to distract people. Another video said that “people are convinced that China decided to release the virus by ‘accident’ ... as a way of controlling population.”