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.
“What sets TikTok apart is that the accurate information about China’s human rights abuses are most successfully crowded out on the platform,” says Joel Finkelstein, director and chief science officer of NCRI. In a survey conducted alongside the study, people who used TikTok for three hours or more daily were significantly more positive about China’s human rights record than non-users.