What is the truth about US claims that TikTok spreads Chinese propaganda?

Is TikTok trying to secretly influence Americans at the behest of the Chinese government?

That question is at the heart of a legal battle over a law passed by Congress that could result in a ban on the popular social media company in the United States — a showdown that will go to court on Monday when both sides present oral arguments in a Washington courtroom.

In court documents filed ahead of the trial (heavily redacted because they contain classified information), the Justice Department and a senior U.S. intelligence official say they have no direct evidence that China has used TikTok for propaganda purposes in the U.S. They also say there is a significant risk that it will.

But a pair of academic studies — cited in court documents and congressional testimony — argue that the platform is biased in favor of the views of the Chinese government, including hiding information about China’s treatment of the Uighur minority and its activities in Tibet. And an analysis of the ownership structure of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, obtained by NBC News shows that the company is deeply entangled with some of China’s major propaganda organs.

The research, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University, “presents compelling and strong circumstantial evidence of covert content manipulation on TikTok,” the authors wrote. The latest study, published last month, found that TikTok suppresses anti-China content compared with YouTube and other social media platforms.

TikTok says the research is deeply flawed. The Justice Department disagrees and cited some of the research in its brief for Monday’s oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, TikTok’s first foray into a federal courtroom to challenge the law. The case could eventually go all the way to the Supreme Court.

The ownership analysis, prepared by Strider Technologies — a private analytics firm with a long history of combing through publicly available information in China — examines the Chinese government’s influence over TikTok through its so-called golden share, a 1% stake in ByteDance’s main Chinese subsidiary that it says gives the company three directorships and other special privileges. In recent years, Chinese government entities have increasingly been buying golden shares in tech companies, according to media reports.

TikTok claims there is nothing unusual about this design.

Congress passes de facto ban

As many as a third of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 get most of their news from TikTok, and research shows that half of that group uses the platform to keep up with politics. The platform’s growing popularity, amid increasingly hostile U.S. relations with China, has prompted a rare bipartisan push for action in Washington this year.

In April, Congress passed a law giving ByteDance 270 days to sell TikTok. If it doesn’t, the app will be subject to restrictions on what it can download and share. ByteDance says that amounts to a ban, and the company has gone to court to stop it, arguing that it violates the First Amendment’s protections for free speech.

Members of Congress from both parties say they view TikTok as fundamentally controlled by the Chinese government, regardless of assurances of independence by company officials.

“We should not lose sight of the fact that under Chinese law, TikTok’s owners are ultimately beholden not to shareholders or their users, but to the Chinese Communist Party,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement to NBC News.

U.S. intelligence agencies have for years raised concerns about what they describe as national security threats from TikTok, framing them as potential harm that has yet to materialize.

They argue the risks are twofold: that the Chinese government could exploit sensitive information TikTok stores on its 170 million U.S. users, including location and phone contacts; and that TikTok’s proprietary algorithm could be secretly manipulated by the Chinese government to shape the content its users receive “for its own malicious purposes,” as the Justice Department brief puts it.

U.S. officials also emphasize that China’s national security law requires Chinese companies to share data and cooperate with the government upon request.

TikTok counters that the information it collects is no different than that collected by many popular apps, and says it would never share data or shape its content at the behest of the Chinese government. And it says the U.S. government also has the ability to demand user data from tech companies for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.

In a statement accompanying the latest Justice Department documents, a senior intelligence official — Casey Blackburn, deputy director of national intelligence and director of the Office of Economic Security and Emerging Technologies in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — wrote that ByteDance and TikTok “pose a potential national security risk to the United States because they could be used by (the People’s Republic of China) against the United States in two primary ways: to exert harmful foreign influence on U.S. citizens and to collect sensitive information about U.S. citizens.”

He wrote that “there is a risk that the PRC could force ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate the information received by the millions of Americans who use TikTok every day, through censorship or manipulation of TikTok’s algorithm, in a way that benefits the PRC and harms the United States.”

However, he added that “we have no information that the PRC has done this with respect to a platform operated by TikTok in the United States.”

NCRI’s analysis shows that TikTok’s content delivery system is already biased and benefits the Chinese government.

The first, published in December 2023 and cited in Blackburn’s statement, found that sensitive topics often censored by the Chinese government within its borders — including the Tiananmen Square massacre, China’s persecution of Tibetans and Uyghurs, and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong — are significantly underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram. This is true even though content about popular culture topics tends to appear on Instagram and TikTok with the same frequency, according to the analysis.

“We assess that there is a high probability that content on TikTok is amplified or suppressed because it aligns with the interests of the Chinese government,” the report reads.

In the second study, published last month, researchers created 24 accounts on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok and searched for content that is often censored in China, including “Uyghur,” “Xinjiang,” “Tibet” and “Tiananmen.” The results included significantly more pro-China than anti-China content, and significantly more irrelevant information than appeared on other platforms, the study said.

“The report found that TikTok’s algorithms actively suppress content critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while amplifying pro-China propaganda and promoting distracting, irrelevant content,” the researchers wrote.

In a statement, TikTok called the study “a non-peer-reviewed, flawed experiment… clearly designed to reach a false, predetermined conclusion.”

A TikTok spokesperson added: “Creating fake accounts that interact with the app in certain ways does not reflect the experiences of real users, just as this alleged study does not reflect facts or reality.”

In his statement, Blackburn, the US intelligence official, says the US concerns about content manipulation “stem from actions ByteDance and TikTok have already taken abroad, as well as from (China’s) malign actions in the United States, which, while not involving ByteDance and TikTok to date, demonstrate that the country has the ability and intent to engage in malign foreign influence and theft of confidential data.”

Chinese government participation

TikTok’s CEO told Congress his company has no ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Strider’s analysis points to the “golden share” being owned by Net Investment Chinese (Beijing) Technology Co. The company is jointly owned by the Communist Party-run Central Radio and Television Station of China and the State Cultural Assets Supervision and Administration Bureau in Beijing, as well as other government entities, Strider found.

“Despite the relatively small economic ownership associated with this stake, the special shares include privileges that give Net Investment Chinese (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. and its government controllers significant influence over ByteDance,” Strider wrote in his analysis.

Among those appointed by the company to the board of its ByteDance subsidiary was Wu Shugang, who “has spent most of his public sector career in propaganda positions since joining China’s Ministry of Education in 2007, according to Chinese government websites and official media reports.”

ByteDance said the Chinese subsidiary had to enter into a “special management share agreement” to obtain licenses for its social media apps — and that the subsidiary has no influence over the parent’s global operations, including TikTok.

A TikTok spokesperson said: “It is common knowledge that all international companies must comply with local laws and regulations of the jurisdictions in which they operate.”

In their legal brief, TikTok’s lawyers did not attempt to address the government’s national security concerns, which they called “speculative,” or its links to the Chinese Communist Party. They portrayed the case as a free speech dispute.

They cited a Supreme Court ruling issued at the height of the Cold War that ruled that the First Amendment prohibits attempts to ban the receipt of “communist political propaganda” from abroad.

“Subject to narrow, well-established exceptions that do not apply here, speech does not lose First Amendment protection because the government believes it is untrue,” they wrote.

“Never before has Congress carved out and closed an explicit forum for speech. Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.”