TikTok boosts posts favored by CCP: report

A new study conducted by researchers at Rutgers University's Network Contagion Research Institute has found that TikTok promotes and demotes videos based on how they align with the preferences of the Chinese Communist Party.

While certain topics, such as pop culture and domestic US politics, appeared unimpacted, other posts that involved issues close to the CCP were revealed to be inorganically more, or less, likely to show up on users' feeds.

According to NBC News, researchers picked a number of hashtags and measured their performance on both TikTok and Instagram. For pop culture tags, such as #TaylorSwift, the ratio of posts to users on each platform was consistent at around 2.2-1. The researchers said this baseline measurement made since because there are more users on Instagram than TikTok.

When it came to political hashtags however, this was not the case. There were, for example, 8.5 posts containing tags expressing support for Ukraine on Instagram per one on TikTok.

The difference was even more stark for tags related to Hong Kong. For every one post on TikTok that included #HongKongProtests, there were 206 such posts on Instagram. 

A similar, but opposite, phenomenon occurred with posts related to Kashmir; those that aligned with the CCP's goals were spotted on TikTok 661 times for every one on Instagram.
 

"We assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese Government," researchers concluded upon completion of the study, suggesting it was "challenging to imagine that activity of such magnitude could occur on a platform organically, and without the knowledge and consent of the platform itself."

In a statement to NBC News, TikTok called the findings "baseless" and accused researchers of arriving at their conclusions via flawed methodology.

"It fails to take into account the basic fact that hashtags are created by users, not by TikTok," the social media giant argued. "Most importantly, anyone familiar with how the platform works can see for themselves the content they refer to is widely available and claims of suppression are baseless."