TikTok Stacking Algorithms in Chinese Government’s Favor, Study Claims
A study published on Thursday asserts TikTok’s algorithms promote Chinese Communist Party narratives and suppress content critical of those narratives, a claim the embattled company forcefully denied to KQED.
Titled “The CCP’s Digital Charm Offensive,” the study by the Rutgers University-based Network Contagion Research Institute argues that much of the pro-China content originates from state-linked entities. ByteDance, a Chinese technology company, owns TikTok.
Institute co-founder Joel Finkelstein wrote that includes media outlets and influencers, such as travel vloggers who post toothlessly about Chinese regions like Xinxiang, where the government has imprisoned more than 1 million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities.
“This manipulation is not just about content availability; it extends to psychological manipulation, particularly affecting Gen Z users,” Finkelstein wrote.
[…]
An NCRI analysis published in December looked at the volume of posts with certain hashtags — like “Uyghur,” “Xinjiang,” “Tibet” and “Tiananmen” — across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. That report found **anomalies in TikTok content based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government. **For example, researchers wrote, hashtags about Tibet, Hong Kong protests and the Uyghur population appeared to be underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.
Whataboutism, the rhetorical practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counteraccusation, by asking a different but related question, or by raising a different issue altogether. Whataboutism often serves to reduce the perceived plausibility or seriousness of the original accusation or question by suggesting that the person advancing it is hypocritical or that the responder’s misbehavior is not unique or unprecedented.
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