Well, if like most of us, you must have found yourself spending hours watching everything from cooking tips to funny clips of people’s pets.
But what if I told you that while you were giggling at the last funny dance move, the app may have been gently persuading you to have a better attitude towards China? That’s right! TikTok may be singling out content that is favorable to the Chinese government, a new study suggests.
The Study That Revealed This
According to a study made by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), there is pretty compelling proof that TikTok’s algorithm can’t be considered as mere spectator. Rather, it presumably could be promoting posts that depict China in a positive way. Well, this may not be definite evidence that the Chinese government is up to something big, but it throws up quite a lot of questions.
How TikTok’s Algorithm works as Pro-China
Thus, what did this study reveal? Picture this: you want to watch travel videos on TikTok and suddenly you see a handful of videos promoting the beauty of China. These videos are not just those funny and exciting moments which tourists upload.
And some of them are associated with Chinese state-backed accounts.
On the other hand, videos that may be considered more delicate, such as the plight of the Uyghur people in China, are not as easy to come by to your feed.
The study also aimed to measure the effect of this content boost on the perception of viewers. Interviewing nearly 1,200 Americans, the authors learned that TikTok users are 50% more likely to have a favorable attitude toward China, when compared to the less active users of the app.
Why Should We Care?
Well, you are probably wondering, “So what? It is just some videos, isn’t it?” And this is where the real matter begins. Christopher Wray, the FBI Director has noted that it would literally be very hard to notice whether there was a foreign government that was actually calling the shots behind the scenes.
The authors of this study maintain that the evidence presented in their work puts us in a desperate search for some form of regulation that will be more or less transparent. For instance, they even propose forming a public trust for the protection of democratic norms and the freedom to choose what to think on our own with funding provided by the platforms.
Wrapping It Up
Therefore, whenever you are going through TikTok, get it in your mind that there is so much more beyond cats and dances. Tiktok is still here entertaining us, but we should also look at how all of the content we are consuming could be influencing our views, which is important when we’re talking about something as major as international relations.
In other words, the Tiktok algorithm is not only promoting the posts to identify the videos that you might like, but is doing slightly more than that! It may be bending the directions of the conversation towards supporting the Chinese government. And while the evidence isn’t rock-solid, it’s enough to start considering it as mainstream problem.
