TikTok Demotes Content Critical of the Chinese Government: Study
TIK-TOK TIME BOMB
These findings come after a House committee asked the FBI for a briefing on its efforts to “protect Americans’ data from falling into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”
TikTok is likely boosting and demoting subject matter depending on its alignment with China foreign policy, according to a Thursday report from the Network Contagion Research Institute in partnership with Rutgers University. The New York Times stated that this research raises concerns that the Chinese government is controlling content on the video sharing platform, which is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance. The study reviewed TikTok posts with popular hashtags and political keywords and compared them with Instagram. While words like #TaylorSwift and #Biden approximately appeared on Instagram two times for every one TikTok post, the ratio skyrocketed to 8:1 for #Uyghur, 57:1 for #TiananmenSquare, and 174:1 for #HongKongProtest. Joel Finkelstein, a founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, stated, “It’s not believable that this could happen organically.” But Alex Haurek, a spokesperson for TikTok, hit back at the report, saying, “The report uses a flawed methodology to reach a predetermined, false conclusion,” and arguing that favored hashtags were made by users, not the platform. These findings come after a House committee focused on economic and security competition with China asked the FBI on Dec. 7 for a briefing on its investigation into ByteDance and efforts to “protect Americans’ data from falling into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”
