As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments later this week on whether the federal government can ban TikTok, a team of social media researchers is re-upping its argument that the social media platform acts as a propaganda machine for the Chinese government.
Their paper, due to be published in the journal Frontiers in Social Psychology, argues that TikTok surfaces content critical of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) talking points less often than competing platforms despite that content generating high user engagement and that Americans who were frequent TikTok users expressed more favorable opinions toward China than those who frequented other social media sites.
The research was produced by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University, whose previous studies examining pro-Chinese moderation on TikTok have been criticized by ByteDance, the social media platform’s parent company, in part because the researchers conducted their studies by creating dummy accounts to simulate user experiences rather than examining actual TikTok users’ feeds.
“This flawed experiment was clearly engineered to reach a false, predetermined conclusion,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes wrote in a statement. “Previous research by NCRI has been debunked by outside analysts and this latest paper is equally flawed. 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.”
The new peer-reviewed paper, which was first reported by The Free Press, begins by examining whether content on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube related to the keywords “Tiananmen,” “Tibet,” “Uyghur,” and “Xinjiang” tends to display pro- or anti-CCP sentiment. The researchers found that TikTok’s algorithm didn’t necessarily surface more pro-CCP content in response to searches for those terms, but it delivered fewer anti-CCP posts than did Instagram or YouTube and significantly more posts that were irrelevant to the subject.
In the second stage of their study, the NCRI team tested whether the lower performance of anti-CCP content was a result of less user engagement (likes and comments) with those posts. They found that TikTok users “liked or commented on anti-CCP content nearly four times as much as they liked or commented on pro-CCP content, yet the search algorithm produced nearly three times as much pro-CCP content” while there was no similar discrepancy on Instagram or YouTube.
Finally, the researchers surveyed 1,214 Americans about their social media usage and their views on China’s human rights record. The more time users spent on any social media platform, the more likely they were to have favorable views of China’s human rights record, the survey showed. Users were particularly more likely to have favorable views if they spent more than three hours a day using TikTok.
The researchers wrote that they could not definitively conclude that spending more time on TikTok resulted in more positive views of China, but “taken together, the findings from these three studies raise the distinct possibility that TikTok is a vehicle for CCP propaganda.”
Congress passed a law last year that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban on the platform in the U.S. A federal appeals court upheld the law in response to a legal challenge from the company, and the case is now scheduled for a Supreme Court hearing on Friday.
Other major social media platforms also collect vast amounts of sensitive data about their users and suppress content likely to anger various governments. But U.S. Intelligence agencies have argued that because TikTok is owned by a Chinese company it presents a particular propaganda and security threat.
English (US) ·