Disinformation or Chinese Ideology: Is China Using TikTok to Mislead Its Users?

A shocking report has revealed that nearly 20 percent of the search results sampled for key news topics on TikTok contained misleading information, NewsGuard revealed.

According to NewsGuard, which tracks online disinformation in the world, the false allegations covered topics such as the Russian operation in Ukraine, COVID-19 vaccines, and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The report also found that searching with non-misleading information can lead to results full of misinformation; for example, when "climate change" was researched, TikTok presented results related to climate science denial.

The report also claims that the results were more polarized than they were through Google, with 12 out of 20 results in mid-2022 including highly partisan data.

 

Deliberate Misinformation?

Although TikTok may be an easy platform for entertaining videos, anyone looking to learn about COVID-19, climate change, or Russia's invasion of Ukraine is likely to find inaccurate information there, according to a study released on Wednesday.

When NewsGuard researchers searched TikTok for content on popular news subjects, they discovered that over 1 in 5 of the videos that were automatically suggested by the platform contained false information.

For instance, the top five videos that came up in searches for "mRNA vaccination" featured false material, including unsupported claims that the COVID-19 vaccine results in "permanent harm in children's essential organs."

Researchers who searched for material on TikTok regarding abortion, the 2020 election, the January 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol, climate change, or Russia's invasion of Ukraine discovered comparable deceptive videos mixed in with more factual ones.

Given TikTok's popularity among young people, the volume of disinformation—and the ease with which it can be found—is particularly alarming, according to Steven Brill, CEO of NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation.

Brill questioned whether ByteDance, the Chinese firm that controls TikTok, is doing enough to stop false information from spreading or whether it is actively doing so in order to show uncertainty in the United States and other Western democracies.

According to Brill, "It's either incompetence, or it's something worse." TikTok released a statement in response to NewsGuard's report noting that its community guidelines prohibit harmful misinformation and that it works to promote authoritative content about important topics like COVID-19.

"We do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform," the company said.

 

Official Accusations

In November 2021, Dutch researcher Zuza Nazaruk published a study titled Politics in the De-politicised: TikTok as a Source of China's Soft Power in the Journal of Political Risk.

Nazaruk says that in 2020, TikTok gained 89 million new users in the U.S. alone, making it the most downloaded app worldwide. Currently, 23% of Americans watch or use TikTok, and in 2020, the typical American user will spend 14.3 hours per month on the app.

The most catastrophic breach, according to then-President Donald Trump's accusations against TikTok in July 2020, was exchanging user data with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

TikTok is in a position to serve as a potential conduit for China's soft power because of its innovative outreach to and popularity among the Western audience. Though TikTok's cybersecurity and data privacy issues have received extensive attention from researchers and journalists

TikTok is able to manage the flow of information across borders and languages, giving it political power. There are solid grounds for believing that the CCP exerts control over or influence over this power, particularly the CCP's history of suppression of TikTok and its relationship with CEO Zhang Yiming of ByteDance.

Yiming denied claims made during the "TikTok war" that the CCP party machinery obtains Western user data.

However, Yiming's connection to the CCP is ambiguous at best. In a public apology, he said that, among other faults, his scientific endeavors had violated the "socialist basic values."

"This incident shows that TikTok is, in most probability, not allowed to operate outside the party rule and creates expectations that the app does carry some strategic communications on behalf of the CCP," Nazaruk mentioned.

 

Indirect Propaganda

Another study published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) proved that TikTok deploys wide-ranging censorship on its Western platforms.

The report claims that the app has a history of suppressing and burying content that criticizes politicians that are seen as being far from China's geopolitical allies, like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi of India, and Shinzo Abe of Japan.

Although topics deemed uncomfortable by the CCP, such as the treatment of the Uighurs in the Xinjiang province, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Tibet's independence, or Falun Gong, are also censored, showing that its American policy is hiding videos with any political content, not just those related to China.

In July 2022, Anders Corr, author and principal at Corr Analytics Inc., called for a ban on TikTok in the U.S.

Since Beijing ultimately owns TikTok, careless users are also likely to lose access to their personal information.

Additionally, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manipulates the TikTok algorithm to favor a political message that advances China's national interests over other interests. It does this via controlling ByteDance, the parent firm of TikTok.

"Congresspeople should step into the breach and protect the privacy of U.S. TikTok users. The only way to do so is to direct them, through a ban, to other more trusted social media companies. This will also protect U.S. national security by ensuring that Beijing can't use the TikTok algorithm to influence voters' political beliefs," Corr called.