Ahead of SCOTUS Hearing, Study Finds TikTok Is Likely Vehicle For Chinese Propaganda

A forthcoming peer-reviewed study (PDF) from Rutgers University's Network Contagion Research Institute argues that TikTok surfaces fewer anti-CCP posts compared to Instagram and YouTube, despite higher user engagement with such content. It also found that heavy TikTok usage correlates with more favorable views of China's human rights record. The findings come a Supreme Court hearing later this week on whether the federal government can ban TikTok. Gizmodo reports: 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.'

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