Study: TikTok Algorithms Align With Chinese Communist Propaganda

Revealing new evidence pointed toward the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) being even more involved with wildly popular social media app TikTok than previously suspected. 

Released late last month by Network Contagion Research, the study showed indications that the app artificially supports topics and ideas aligned with the CCP. This comes in the form of boosting hashtags and subject matter suitable for totalitarian purposes.

Conversely, TikTok appeared to suppress those that do not march in lockstep with CCP propaganda and political interests.

This is something that U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have long suspected. Even Biden’s embattled FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Congress that the app “screams” of national security concerns.

It is blatantly obvious that the social media narrative promoted by TikTok hardly corresponds with the national security interests of free world governments. The federal government and several states already banned the app on their devices and networks.

The research spotlighted several hashtags related to the CCP. Some were strongly in lockstep with the party while others were neutral. Still others covered topics Beijing would like to suppress.

In this way, user engagement was measured on both TikTok and Instagram. The results were striking.

Topics hostile to Chinese Communists, including Tiananmen Square, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan showed up with much less frequency on TikTok.

At the same time, seemingly neutral topics to the CCP such as Trump, Biden or pop culture features displayed a more normal rate of engagement.

However, topics that the CCP favored appeared more heavily among users. This appeared to strongly signify that these are being artificially boosted on the Chinese app.

Specifically, the study’s authors noted that there is as much as a 500% difference in user engagement in topics favoring or against the Chinese Communist narrative.

Researchers noted that the hashtag #standwithkashmir, which is part of the region’s independence movement that is supported by Beijing, has astronomically more activity than rival topics.

There were over 225 million posts related to the hashtag, according to the authors. This far outnumbered all other political hashtags combined that were found in the sample.

Despite denials by TikTok and parent company Byte Dance, the study’s conclusion is obvious. As many suspected, Chinese Communists appear to be pulling the strings of the popular social media app. Therefore it should have no place in Western society.