The latest wave of fearmongering about TikTok involves a study purportedly showing that the app suppresses content unflattering to China. The study attracted a lot of coverage in the American media, with some declaring it all the more reason to ban the video-sharing app.
“Hopefully members of Congress will take a look at this report and maybe bring the authors to Washington to give testimony about their findings,” wrote John Sexton at Hot Air. The study “suggests that the next generation will have had a significant portion of their news content spoon fed to them by a communist dictatorship,” fretted Leon Wolf at Blaze Media. “TikTok suppression study is another reason to ban the app,” declared a Washington Examiner editorial.
But there are serious flaws in the study design that undermine its conclusions and any panicky takeaways from them.
In the study, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) compared the use of specific hashtags on Instagram (owned by the U.S. company Meta) and on TikTok (owned by the Chinese company ByteDance). The analysis included hashtags related both to general subjects and to “China sensitive topics” such as Uyghurs, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square. “While ratios for non-sensitive topics (e.g., general political and pop-culture) generally followed user ratios (~2:1), ratios for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were much higher (>10:1),” states the report, titled “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives.”
The study concludes that there is “a strong possibility that TikTok systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government.”
There are ample reasons to be skeptical of this conclusion. Paul Matzko pointed out some of these in a recent Cato Institute blog post, identifying “two remarkably basic errors that call into question the fundamental utility of the report.”
The errors are so glaring that it’s hard not to suspect an underlying agenda at work here.
Hellbound and Down 