TikTok shows less 'anti-China' content than rivals, study finds

Videos condemning or negatively depicting China's human rights abuses are more difficult to find on TikTok than other rival networks, a new study finds, suggesting that users may be getting an incomplete picture of the country's history when searching for key terms or phrases.
U.S. TikTok users who search for terms like "Tiananmen," "Tibet," and "Uyghur"—words commonly used in Chinese Communist Party propaganda—see less "anti-China" content than those same searches produce on Instagram and YouTube, according to a new study from the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University.
Analysts created 24 new accounts across ByteDance Ltd.-owned TikTok, Meta Platforms Inc.'s Instagram and Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube, to replicate the experience of American teenagers signing up for social media. When searching for keywords often related to the country's human rights abuses, TikTok's algorithm displayed a higher percentage of positive, neutral or irrelevant content than both Instagram and YouTube, the study found.
TikTok, owned by a Beijing-based company, has faced intense scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and regulators concerned about the Chinese government's influence over the social media app and its potential threat to national security. Earlier this year, President Joe Biden signed a law forcing ByteDance to sell the app by Jan. 19 or face a ban in the U.S.
TikTok pointed Bloomberg to a critique of that research published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian, free-market think tank. (One of Cato's Institute's key donors and former board members, Jeffrey S. Yass, is also a significant shareholder in TikTok's parent company, ByteDance.)
To conduct the study, researchers collected more than 3,400 videos related to the keywords "Uyghur," "Xinjiang," "Tibet" and "Tiananmen," terms researchers consider important to the Chinese government's messaging. Researchers searched for each keyword on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and viewed the first 300 or so videos that were displayed.
From there, each video was classified as either pro-China, anti-China, neutral or irrelevant by up to three human reviewers. Researchers pointed out that their classification of content as pro-China or anti-China involved "subjective judgment." They further cautioned that "although efforts were made to minimize bias, the potential for interpretative differences remains."
The analysis found that TikTok contained the highest proportion of pro-China content across all three platforms for searches of the words "Tibet" and "Tiananmen."
More than 25% of search results for "Tiananmen" for example, were considered pro-China, which researchers defined as patriotic songs, travel promotions or scenic representations that make no mention of the 1989 massacre there.
In comparison, only about 16% of search results on Instagram were pro-China, and just about 8% on YouTube. A spokesperson for Instagram declined to comment. YouTube representatives didn't immediately respond to a request.
In some cases, Instagram and YouTube showed higher rates of pro-China content than TikTok. For "Uyghur" and "Xinjiang," about 50% of searches on YouTube returned positive content, compared to less than 25% on TikTok. Researchers attributed the results to a handful of influential accounts created by, or affiliated with, state actors.
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