New Jersey [US]: A recent report by Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) based in New Jersey claimed that TikTok has been promoting pro-China content to twist the views of users in the US.
The 32-page report titled The CCP’s Digital Charm Offensive: How TikTok’s Search Algorithm and Pro-China Influence Networks Indoctrinate GenZ Users in the United States, highlighted the association between social media platform usage and pro-CCP attitudes among users. It also unveiled the extent to which TikTok and other platforms may influence user perceptions and behaviours in favour of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The report claimed that TikTok’s algorithms consistently amplify pro-CCP content and suppress anti-CCP narratives, Pro- CCP content originates from state-linked entities which include media outlets and influencers and the same report quoted its survey data showing a significant shift in user attitudes towards China, especially among heavy TikTok users, indicating successful indoctrination.
The user data in the same report demonstrated patterns consistent that TikTok is suppressing anti-China content to diminish the reach of narratives critical of the CCP. The report mentioned that TikTok contained the lowest proportion of anti-China content compared to Instagram or YouTube. Similarly, the data also observed that pro-China and irrelevant content constituted between 61-93 per cent of search results on TikTok, illustrating how flattering or distracting content is systematically amplified as a way to subsume the low proportion of anti-China coverage extant on the platform.
Quoting an example of searches related to “Tiananmen” the same report by the NCRI mentioned that, 26.6 per cent of search results on TikTok for “Tiananmen” were categorized as pro-China, versus 16.3 per cent on Instagram and 7.7 per cent on YouTube. Conversely, the proportion of anti-China content on YouTube (64.6 per cent) and Instagram (56.3 per cent) was more than double on TikTok (19.6 per cent).
In the same report by NCRI, a similar breakdown was found in categories for the search term “Tibet”. Reportedly, TikTok contained the highest proportion of pro-China content and the lowest proportion of anti-China content by far across all three platforms. The analysis also showed that the proportion of neutral content was similar across all three platforms.
For the search term “Uyghur” anti-China content was measured at a mere 10.7 per cent on TikTok results vs. 19 per cent on YouTube and an overwhelmingly 84 per cent on Instagram results. In contrast, pro-China content comprised 17 per cent of TikTok data compared to 2.7 per cent on Instagram and 49.2 per cent on YouTube.
At first glance, this increase in pro-China content on YouTube relative to TikTok appears unintuitive, but upon closer examination, these differences can be attributed to the strategic cultivation of pro-China media assets on YouTube and Instagram. We observed that these assets have effectively dominated on-platform search results in what constitutes an example par excellence of bottom-up influencing on YouTube and Instagram, the report by the NCRI claimed.
While highlighting the involvement of official or semi-official CCP media sources in the same matter the same report stated that, on YouTube, four of the top five most active accounts that figured in search results were official or semi-official CCP media sources (CGTN, South China Morning Post, ShanghaiEye, and CCTV Video News Agency that enjoy an accumulated subscriber pool of 8M users. These four users generated 21.7 per cent of all content retrieved for “Xinjiang” and nearly 40 per cent of all pro-China content on YouTube.