A newly updated study concludes that the popular Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok suppresses anti-China content and influences user opinion on the communist country’s human rights record and society, likely manipulating its algorithm.
The study from researchers from Rutgers University and the Network Contagion Research Institute, follows preliminary findings from the group released in August and is now backed by more evidence than before.
The findings are set to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, Frontiers in Social Psychology, as the embattled social media app faces a forced sale to continue operating in the United States. The company is currently challenging the law passed by Congress earlier this year that would ban the app if it doesn’t cut ties with its Chinese owners, ByteDance, before January 19, 2025.
President-elect Donald Trump has also injected himself in the case in an attempt to delay the law from taking effect. The president-elect credits the video-sharing app with his electoral gains among young voters in the 2024 election and has spoken favorably of the platform leading up to his inauguration.
“We did go on TikTok and we had a great response with billions of views,” Trump said in a speech at AmericaFest, a conference hosted by Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action in December, shortly before seeking to intervene in the case.
“They brought me a chart … and as I looked at it, I said, maybe we got to keep this sucker around for a little while,” he said. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News about the study’s findings.
Negotiated solution?
The president’s lawyer said Trump wants the court to delay its decision so that he can negotiate a solution, saying the president-elect has a mandate and “the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns.”
TikTok strongly criticized the report’s methodology and suggested its results were “engineered.”
“This flawed experiment was clearly engineered to reach a false, predetermined conclusion,” a TikTok spokesperson told Just the News in a statement. “Previous research by NCRI has been debunked by outside analysts and this latest paper is equally flawed. Creating fake accounts that interact with the app in a prescribed manner does not reflect real users’ experience, just as this so-called study does not reflect facts or reality.”
Although the study’s authors recognized several limitations with their data, including the perhaps unrepresentative method of using newly created accounts to mimic real users’ experiences and an inability to determine whether the algorithm is truly being manipulated without the code, the researchers say their data is enough to warrant increased transparency from social media platforms on their algorithms and warn about China’s ability to influence public opinion.
