
Is TikTok Pushing Chinese Propaganda?
By Movieguide® Contributor
TikTok has denied that it has been trying to influence users with Chinese propaganda, but a pair of new studies claim the platform is pushing Chinese government views.
Court documents from the Justice Department say that there is “no direct evidence” China has used Tiktok for propaganda purposes, but two studies “present compelling and strong circumstantial evidence of TikTok’s covert content manipulation,” per NBC.
For example, topics that are censored in China, like the Tiananmen Square massacre or China’s oppression of the Tibetan people, are “significantly underrepresented on TikTok compared to Instagram.”
“We assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government,” one of the studies, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute in 2023, stated.
The second study, also conducted by NCRI last month, “establishes that TikTok algorithms actively suppress content critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while simultaneously boosting pro-China propaganda and promoting distracting, irrelevant content.”
A spokesperson for TikTok responded to the studies, calling them a “non-peer reviewed, flawed experiment…clearly engineered to reach a false, predetermined conclusion.”
“Creating fake accounts that interact with the app in a prescribed manner does not reflect real users’ experience, just as this so-called study does not reflect facts or reality,” they continued.
Movieguide® previously reported on worries about China’s influence on TikTok:
The Justice Department is claiming TikTok used the app to collect data on the public’s opinion on social issues like gun control and abortion.
NBC reported that government lawyers filed a brief that accused TikTok and parent company ByteDance of using “an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.”
“TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about U.S. users, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said,” the outlet continued.
The filing also claimed that one of Lark’s internal search tools allowed TikTok and ByteDance to collect data on things like users’ views on abortion and religion.
The prosecutors also raised concerns that the TikTok algorithm could be used to secretly manipulate and influence Americans.
“Among other things, it would allow a foreign government to illicitly interfere with our political system and political discourse, including our elections,” the filing stated, per CNN, adding, “If, for example, the Chinese government were to determine that the outcome of a particular American election as sufficiently important to Chinese interests.”
It continued, “Allowing the Chinese government to remain poised to use TikTok to maximum effectiveness at a moment of extreme importance presents an unacceptable threat to national security.”