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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 reiterating their argument that the social media platform acts like a machine of propaganda for the Chinese government.
I know paperto be published in the journal Frontiers in Social Psychology, argues that TikTok makes content critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) points of discussion less often than competing platforms despite that content generating high user engagement and that Americans who were frequent users of TikTok expressed more. favorable views toward China than those who frequent other social media sites.
The research was produced by the Contagion Network Research Institute at Rutgers University, whose previous studies examining pro-Chinese moderation on TikTok have been criticized by ByteDance, the social media platform company, in part because the researchers conducted their studies by creating fictitious accounts to simulate user experiences instead of examining the feeds of TikTok users.
“This flawed experiment was clearly engineered to reach a false, predetermined conclusion,” TikTok spokesman Michael Hughes wrote in a statement. “Previous research from NCRI has been burst out by external analysts and this last document is equally flawed. The creation of fake accounts that interact with the app in a prescribed manner does not reflect the experience of real users, just as this so-called study does not reflect facts or reality.”
The new peer-reviewed paper, which was first reported by The free pressbegins by examining whether content on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube related to the keywords “Tiananmen”, “Tibet”, “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang” tends to show a pro- or anti-CCP sentiment. The researchers found that TikTok’s algorithm did not necessarily surface more pro-CCP content in response to searches for these terms, but it did provide fewer anti-CCP posts than 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 the result of less user engagement (likes and comments) with those posts. They found that TikTok users “liked or commented on anti-CCP content almost four times as often as they liked or commented on pro-CCP content, but the search algorithm produced almost three times as much pro content -CCP” while there were no similar ones. discrepancy on Instagram or YouTube.
Finally, the researchers surveyed 1,214 Americans about their use of social media 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 a favorable view 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 with TikTok.
The researchers wrote that they could not definitively conclude that spending more time on TikTok resulted in a more positive view of China, but “taken together, the results of these three studies raise the distinct possibility that TikTok is a vehicle for the 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 by the company, and the case is now scheduled for a Supreme Court. hearing on Friday.
Other major social media platforms also collect large amounts of sensitive data about their users and delete the content probably anger different governments. But the United States Intelligence agencies have argued that because TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, it presents a particular propaganda and security threat.
