As you’ve likely heard, TikTok is owned and operated by China, or at least a Chinese tech company known as Byte Dance. But, new studies seem to prove that the CCP has much more influence than we thought.
Thanks to the Network Contagion Research, a study was released on December 21 indicating that topics showing up on the video app are either artificially boosted or demoted based on their relevance to CCP goals.
The study examined a number of topics or hashtags. Some were known to be ones that aligned with CCP agenda items. Others were CCP neutral. And still, others were rather sensitive to the CCP.
What it found was that only those that were neutral appeared to have an organic ratio of user engagement. You know, topics that the CCP doesn’t really care about, like pop culture, general American politics, etc.
For these, user engagement was about 2:1, which is quite normal.
When looking at hashtags that included references to topics like Uyghurs, Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tiananmen Square, or the South China Sea, data shows they were artificially repressed – and in a >10:1 ratio.
Hashtags for pro-CCP topics, on the other hand, ones that include Kashmiri, for example, showed a ratio indicating artificial boosting.
TikTok's Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party's Geostrategic Objectives
In collaboration + @RutgersU, our report takes a data-driven approach: Does TikTok promote or demote content on the basis of CCP interests?
Short answer: It certainly seems so🧵 pic.twitter.com/5OJdODIqfl
— Network Contagion Research Institute (@ncri_io) December 21, 2023
so basically, just like how Twitter was, and possibly still is, censoring certain information, TikTok is being wholly monitored by the CCP, making topics it doesn’t want on there near impossible to see while topics they agree with get boosted.
In fact, according to the study, the most popular hashtag on the platform (#standwithkashmir) had more posts than all other hashtags combined (23,176,698).
Please tell me how many teenagers (the demographic using TikTok the most) care about Kashmiri. For that matter, how many even know what it is…
And yet, it’s the most popular topic on the platform? Yeah, I don’t think so.
