The most recent wave of fearmongering about TikTok entails a research purportedly displaying that the app suppresses content material unflattering to China. The research attracted lots of protection within the American media, with some declaring it all of the extra purpose 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 Sizzling Air. The research “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.
However there are critical flaws within the research design that undermine its conclusions and any panicky takeaways from them.
Within the research, the Community Contagion Analysis Institute (NCRI) in contrast using particular hashtags on Instagram (owned by the U.S. firm Meta) and on TikTok (owned by the Chinese language firm ByteDance). The evaluation included hashtags associated each to basic topics and to “China sensitive topics” reminiscent of Uyghurs, Tibet, and Tiananmen Sq.. “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 research concludes that there’s “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 causes to be skeptical of this conclusion. Paul Matzko identified a few of these in a latest Cato Institute weblog publish, figuring out “two remarkably basic errors that call into question the fundamental utility of the report.”
The errors are so obvious that it is onerous to not suspect an underlying agenda at work right here.
Most notably, the researchers fail to account for variations in how lengthy the 2 social networks in query have been round. Instagram launched almost 7 years earlier than TikTok’s worldwide launch (and almost 6 years earlier than TikTok existed in any respect) and launched hashtags just a few months thereafter (in January 2011). But the researchers’ knowledge assortment course of doesn’t appear to account for the completely different launch dates, nor does their report even point out this disparity. (Cause reached out to the research authors final week to ask about this however has not obtained a response.)
The researchers additionally fail to account for the truth that Instagram and TikTok customers should not equivalent. This leads them “to miss the potential for generational cohort effects,” urged Matzko. “In short, the median user of Instagram is older than the median user of TikTok. Compare the largest segment of users by age on each platform: 25% of TikTok users in the US are ages 10–19, while 27.4% of Instagram users are 25–34.”
It is easy to think about how differing launch dates and typical-user ages might result in variations in content material prevalence, with no nefarious meddling by the Chinese language authorities or algorithmic fiddling by Bytedance wanted.
Take, for example, the discovering that there have been vastly extra Instagram hashtags associated to Tibet or the Dalai Lama than there have been on TikTok (37.7 on Instagram for each one on TikTok). The NCRI reads this as proof that TikTok hid posts associated to those topics. However Instagram had seven further years to rack up posts associated to Tibet. And people had been years wherein Western curiosity in Tibet was typically greater than in newer years. (“A quick peek at Google trends data show that public discourse about Tibet in the US has been in a general decline throughout the 2000s and 2010s, albeit punctuated by exponential spikes…in April 2008 and December 2016,” famous Matzko.) It is solely pure that there could be many extra Tibet-related posts on Instagram than on the extra recently-launched TikTok.
Or take the discovering that Instagram had many extra Ukraine-supportive posts than TikTok did. For example, there have been 12 Instagram posts with the #StandWithUkraine hashtag for each one on TikTok, and 4.2 Instagram posts with the #SaveUkraine hashtag for each one #SaveUkraine TikTok publish. A number of the distinction would possibly stem from the truth that Instagram was round in 2014—when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine—whereas TikTok was not. And even when we assume that a lot of the hashtags relate to the newer battle, we’re nonetheless left with the truth that Instagram’s customers are older than TikTok’s customers. It would not be stunning if 20- and 30-somethings usually tend to publish about Ukraine than teenagers and tweens are.
It isn’t merely median person age that separates Instagram and TikTok. Whereas all types of content material could be discovered on both platform, they’ve every developed distinct cultures, protocols, and so forth., as properly, and that makes cross-platform comparisons hazy.
It is also price noting that whereas the Instagram to TikTok ratio for basic popular culture and political hashtags was pretty low (a 2.2 to 1 ratio for 14 popular culture hashtags and a 2.6 ratio for 18 political hashtags), there was variation inside these teams, significantly in politics. For example, there have been 19.4 #Potus posts, 3.8 #HarryStyles posts, 6.8 #ProLife posts, and 0.6 #Trump2024 posts on Instagram for each one on TikTok. So the concept that China-sensitive content material is the one space with discrepancies shouldn’t be right.
A comparability of hashtags associated to Kashmiri independence paints a very odd image. The hashtags #StandWithKashmir, #WeStandWithKashmir, and #IStandWithKashmir are comparatively scarce on Instagram however fairly considerable on TikTok—to the tune of 370,407 on Instagram and 229,231,866 on TikTok in whole. However a fast search reveals that there are 8,816,839 Instagram posts with the hashtag #Kashmir alone. It is potential a few of these posts are pro-Kashmiri independence and the 2 platforms simply developed completely different common tags.
It is also potential that one thing fishy is happening with the Kashmir posts. However even then it would not essentially observe that this entails nefarious strikes by TikTok. Maybe a pro-Kashmir entity—Chinese language or in any other case—created a bot operation to spam TikTok with this hashtag. The hashtag’s prevalence alone would not inform us that anybody at TikTok tried to amplify it.
And even when we settle for thatChina was behind this (regardless of having no onerous proof for that), we’re nonetheless left with zero details about what sort of accounts used the hashtag, what sort of attain that they had, and whether or not their posts had been seen by many customers.
A hashtag getting used hundreds of thousands of instances might imply nothing if it is utilized by low-follower accounts on movies that get few views.
TikTok famous as a lot in a latest press launch about Israel/Palestine content material on the platform. “The number of videos associated with a hashtag, alone, do not provide sufficient context,” it states. “For example, the hashtag #standwithIsrael may be associated with fewer videos than #freePalestine, but it has 68% more views per video in the US, which means more people are seeing the content.”
Assuming that each one these #IStandWithKashmir posts interprets to vital views and affect is similar mistake individuals made with Russian bots after the 2016 election. Folks took the variety of bots or posts as proof of widespread affect, however comparatively few individuals ever noticed or interacted with their content material.
These flaws within the NCRI research do not disprove the concept that TikTok suppresses China-sensitive content material, in fact. The relative shortage of sure hashtags definitely might nonetheless be as a result of deliberate work. However this research is much from ample proof for that declare. And it appears irresponsible for researchers—and reporters—to attract conclusions from this knowledge with out noting that Instagram has properly over half a decade on TikTok, that a few of the studied subjects had been extra extensively mentioned earlier than TikTok existed, and that there is a vital distinction within the median person age of every platform.