Or if TikTok’s algorithm is a coincidence, it’s an awfully complicated and coincidental kind of coincidence.
On December 21, 2023, the Network Contagion Research Institute published “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives.” According to the study’s BLUF (militarese for “bottom line up front”):
● The Network Contagion Research Institute analyzed hashtag ratios between Instagram and TikTok across topics sensitive to the Chinese Government.
● While ratios for non-sensitive topics (e.g., general political and pop-culture) generally followed user ratios (~2:1), ratios for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were much higher (>10:1).
● We found these anomalies consistently between hashtag ratios on China-sensitive topics for both national/regional and international issues.
● Though more research is needed, NCRI assesses, given this data, a strong possibility that TikTok systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese government.
The study can’t be considered in isolation, though; the “strong possibility” that TikTok obeys the CCP propaganda-wise is really a virtual certainty. We know that the Chinese government regards propaganda, surveillance, and censorship as top priorities and that this despotism has no compunctions about telling firms what to do. Moreover, Chinese law explicitly permits and requires CCP access to any company’s data that might have import for intelligence, including the data collected by TikTok and parent company ByteDance. Even more moreover, CCP officials are right there inside TikTok.
In her article for The Heritage Foundation (“TikTok Generation: A CCP Official in Every Pocket,” March 22, 2023), Kara Frederick writes:
Chinese officials—former and current—are embedded in TikTok’s parent company and involved in the company’s inner workings. In April 2021, the Chinese government acquired a 1 percent stake in ByteDance’s main domestic subsidiary and the board seat that came along with it. This action makes at least one of the three board members, Wu Shugang, a card-carrying official of the Chinese government. Further, a U.S. Department of Justice filing against TikTok assessed in September 2020 that “ByteDance contains an internal corporate CCP committee through which the CCP exercises influence at the company.” At lower levels, an August 2022 Forbes review found more than 300 LinkedIn profiles of current TikTok and ByteDance employees with ties to the Chinese state media apparatus.
Concerns over data security do not scratch the surface of TikTok’s ability to manipulate the information environment. ByteDance and TikTok have already pushed pro-CCP narratives to the U.S. public, censored content of which the party-state disapproves, and gathered the necessary information to conduct tailored influence campaigns. In two years, the percentage of adults who get their news from TikTok on a regular basis rose from only 3 percent in 2020 to 10 percent of American adults in 2022—roughly tripling this audience. Now, nearly a quarter of adults in the United States under the age of 30 claim to regularly get their news from TikTok, according to the same survey. This creates yet another vector for the CCP through which to expand its influence over the cognitive landscape of the American body politic.
See Frederick’s piece at Heritage for citations supporting the details of her claims.
So the NCRI study is helpful as confirmation. As regularly as a metronome, TikTok promotes content that the CCP wants to be promoted and squelches content that the CCP wants to be squelched.
But we already knew that TikTok wasn’t operating in a bubble entirely separate from and immune to the Chinese Communist Party—regardless of the protestations of any TikTok executives. Let’s not debate whether China-based TikTok is an agent of the CCP. It is. Let’s debate, instead, whether TikTok’s data-grabbing or TikTok’s propaganda is the greater threat. Not that these two components of CCP machinations are anything but complementary.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “Proof TikTok Protects User Info From ChinaGov”
“So any organization based in China ‘shall’ help with intelligence gathering if the Chinese government asks. And must also ‘keep the secrets of the national intelligence work from becoming known to the public.’ Is there another provision in Article 7 that says ‘unless you are asked about these secrets in a congressional hearing’?”
