A new study from Rutgers University claims TikTok favors pro-CCP content and downplays criticism of the Chinese government.
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.
A study, 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 criticized 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 study 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
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