TikTok Stacking Algorithms in Chinese Government’s Favor with Pro-China Content Originating from State-Linked Entities, Study Claims
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/1814468
Here is the stuy: The CCP’s Digital Charm Offensive
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.
Remember when everyone kept saying Tik Tok needed to be banned because it can be manipulated by China, and when the US started to ban it everyone started saying that it needs to be saved, and now (shock horror) China is manipulating it? Pretty sick timeline we're in
If you have the impression that there's a dominant, homogeneous "mass" sharing the same opinion, you are right there in the middle of an information bubble and a victim of those "algorithms".
Sorry, I guess I should make it more overtly clear when I'm speaking in hyperbolics. Quite obviously, I'm aware that not every single person living or dead shares the same opinion. What I mean to say is that most of the popular channels (internet forums, news outlets, social media) seemingly flipped the script overnight, and likely will now do again.
Just to cover my bases: trends are not indictive of every single individual opinions and should not be viewed as such, but are a roughly reliable way to gauge overall public opinion
Tiktok could make the algorithm and how it functions openly visible so the international community stops criticizing them over it, since how it performs being mysterious is what is making them have to defend itself. All algorithm based social media for that matter.
"TikTok does what every social media company does but this time it's Chinese so it's bad" is what this headline should really say.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Whataboutism is typically also an admission of guilt. When the CCP normally use it, they aren’t disagreeing with the accusation, they are justifying their actions.
In this case ByteDance specifically denies the allegations. It doesn’t mean whataboutism can’t be used without a ‘even if’, but the user you are responding to is admitting TikTok is doing things TikTok says they aren’t doing. Doesn’t mean they are a representative of TikTok or the CCP, but definitely not helping their cause.
Let's play Devil's Advocate: ...maybe it's not TikTok's algorithm's fault, but the CCP's ability to have people skilled at manipulating it? TikTok could probably tweak its algorithm to prevent that, but maybe it's more profitable to do nothing?