TikTok displays less ‘anti-China’ content than rivals, study finds

TikTok, owned by a Beijing-based company, has faced intense scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and regulators concerned about the Chinese government’s influence on the social media app and its potential threat to national security. Earlier this year, President Joe Biden signed a bill forcing ByteDance to sell the app by Jan. 19 or face a ban in the U.S.

The idea that TikTok could be used to spread pro-China messages to American citizens, especially young people, was a key factor in congressional efforts to ban the app. During congressional testimony in March, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of China’s ability to “run influence operations” on TikTok, saying such efforts would be “extremely difficult” to detect. NCRI researchers acknowledged that their study does not provide “definitive evidence” that the Chinese government or TikTok employees intentionally manipulated the algorithm. Hashtags are added to content by users.

The analysis builds on previous findings from the NCRI that TikTok amplifies or demotes content based on whether it aligns with Chinese government interests. That report has been frequently cited by U.S. lawmakers who see the app as a national security threat. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew called the previous report misleading when asked about the findings during a Senate hearing earlier this year. TikTok drew Bloomberg’s attention to a critique of the research published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian, free-market think tank. (One of the Cato Institute’s major donors and former board members, Jeffrey S. Yass, is also a major shareholder in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.)

ByteDance and TikTok executives have repeatedly denied accusations that the Chinese government uses the social media app to spread propaganda, but those arguments have failed to reassure U.S. government officials. TikTok sued the U.S. government to overturn the law, arguing that Congress failed to prove its claims that the app poses a national security threat.

NCRI is an independent, nonprofit organization comprised of political scientists, security experts and research analysts. The group receives funding from Rutgers University, the British government and “private philanthropic families,” Finkelstein said.

To conduct the study, the researchers collected more than 3,400 videos related to the keywords “Uyghur,” “Xinjiang,” “Tibet,” and “Tiananmen,” terms the researchers consider important to the Chinese government’s message. The researchers searched for each keyword on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and watched the first 300 videos that appeared. Each video was then classified as pro-China, anti-China, neutral, or irrelevant by up to three reviewers. The researchers noted that their classification of content as pro-China or anti-China involved “subjective judgment.” They also cautioned that “while efforts were made to minimize bias, the potential for differences in interpretation still exists.”

Films that highlighted the plight of Uyghurs in China, mentioned the liberation of Tibet, or contained images based on the Tiananmen Square massacre were classified by reviewers as anti-China content. Official promotional messages from the CCP, messages promoting the narrative that Tibet had been liberated, and patriotic images of Tiananmen Square without mentioning the massacre were considered pro-China content.

The analysis found that TikTok contained the highest percentage of pro-China content across all three platforms for searches for the words “Tibet” and “Tiananmen.”

For example, more than 25 percent of search results for “Tiananmen” were considered pro-China, which researchers defined as patriotic songs, travel promotions or landscape depictions that did not mention the 1989 massacre. By comparison, only about 16 percent of search results on Instagram were pro-China, and only about 8 percent on YouTube. An Instagram spokesman declined to comment. YouTube representatives did not immediately respond to a request.

In some cases, Instagram and YouTube showed higher rates of pro-China content than TikTok. For “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang,” about 50 percent of YouTube searches returned positive content, compared with less than 25 percent for TikTok. The researchers attributed the results to a handful of influential accounts created by or affiliated with state actors.