TikTok claims it doesn’t spread Chinese propaganda. The US says there’s a real risk. What’s the truth?
Is TikTok secretly trying to influence Americans at the behest of the Chinese government?
That question is at the heart of the legal battle over a law passed by Congress that could result in the popular social media company being banned in the United States — a clash that will play out in court Monday as each side presents oral arguments in a Washington, D.C., courtroom.
In court documents filed ahead of the hearing — heavily redacted because they contain classified information — the Justice Department and a senior U.S. intelligence official adamantly say they have no direct evidence that China has used TikTok for propaganda purposes in the United States. They also say there is a significant risk that it will.
But two academic studies cited in court documents and congressional testimony show that the platform is biased toward the views of the Chinese government, including by suppressing information about China’s treatment of its Uighur minority and its actions in Tibet. And an analysis of the ownership structure of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, obtained by NBC News, argues that the company is deeply involved in some of the Chinese government’s top propaganda outlets.
The studies, conducted by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), “present compelling and robust circumstantial evidence of TikTok’s covert manipulation of content,” the authors wrote. The most recent, published last month, found that TikTok suppresses anti-China content compared to YouTube and other social media platforms.
TikTok says those studies are deeply flawed. The Justice Department disagrees, citing some of the research in its brief for oral arguments Monday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, TikTok’s first foray into a federal courtroom to challenge the law. The case could ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.
The ownership analysis, prepared by Strider Technologies, a private analytics firm with long experience filtering publicly available information in China, examines the influence of a Chinese government company on TikTok through what it calls a preferred share, a 1% stake in ByteDance’s main Chinese subsidiary that it says gives the company three director seats and other special privileges. In recent years, media reports have shown that Chinese government entities have increasingly taken preferred shares in tech companies.
TikTok claims there is nothing unusual about this structure.
Congress enacts de facto ban
A third of Americans ages 18 to 29 get their news primarily from TikTok, and one study shows that half of that cohort uses the platform to stay up-to-date on political news. The platform’s growing popularity, amid increasingly fractious U.S.-China relations, has sparked a rare bipartisan push for action in Washington this year.
In April, Congress passed a bill giving ByteDance 270 days to sell TikTok. If it doesn’t, the app will be subject to restrictions on uploads and sharing of content. ByteDance claims this amounts to a ban, and the company has filed a lawsuit to stop it, arguing that it violates the Constitution’s First Amendment protections for free speech.
Members of Congress from both parties say they view TikTok as essentially under the control of the Chinese government, regardless of the company’s executives’ claims of independence.
“We must not lose sight of the fact that under Chinese law, TikTok’s owners are not beholden to shareholders or their users, but to the Chinese Communist Party,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement to NBC News.
U.S. intelligence agencies have been concerned for years about the national security risks they pose from TikTok, which they portray as potential harms that, so far, have not occurred.
They say the risks are twofold: that the Chinese government could exploit the sensitive information TikTok keeps about its 170 million U.S. users, including location and phone contacts; and that TikTok’s proprietary algorithm could be secretly manipulated by the Chinese government to shape the content users receive “for its own malicious purposes,” as the Justice Department filing puts it.
U.S. officials also point out that China’s national security law requires Chinese companies to provide data and cooperate with the government upon request.
TikTok counters that the information it collects is no different than that collected by many popular apps, and says it will never provide data or shape its content at the request of the Chinese government. And it says the U.S. government also has the power to demand user data from tech companies for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.
In a sworn statement attached to the Justice Department’s latest filing, a senior intelligence official — Casey Blackburn, deputy director of national intelligence and director of the Bureau of Economic Security and Emerging Technologies in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — wrote that ByteDance and TikTok “pose a potential threat to the national security of the United States because they could be used by the (People’s Republic of China) against the United States in two primary ways: malign foreign influence targeting U.S. persons and the collection of sensitive data about U.S. persons.”
He wrote that there is a risk that the PRC could force ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate the information received by the millions of Americans who use the TikTok app every day, through censorship or manipulation of TikTok’s algorithm, in a way that benefits the PRC and harms the United States.
But, he added, “we have no information that the PRC has done so with respect to the platform operated by TikTok in the United States.”
NCRI’s analysis suggests that TikTok’s content delivery system is already biased in ways that benefit the Chinese government.
The first study, published in December 2023 and cited in Blackburn’s affidavit, found that sensitive topics often censored by the Chinese government within its borders — including the Tiananmen Square massacre, China’s oppression of Tibetans and the Uighur population, and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong — are significantly underrepresented on TikTok compared to Instagram. This is true even though content about pop culture topics generally appears with equal frequency on Instagram and TikTok, the analysis found.
“We assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok will be amplified or removed based on its alignment with Chinese government interests,” the report said.
In the second study, published last month, researchers created 24 accounts on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok and searched for content that is often censored in China, including “Uighurs,” “Xinjiang,” “Tibet” and “Tiananmen.” The results included significantly more pro-China content than anti-China content, and significantly more irrelevant information than what appeared on the other platforms, the study said.
“This report establishes that TikTok’s algorithms actively suppress content critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while simultaneously reinforcing pro-China propaganda and promoting distracting and irrelevant content,” the researchers wrote.
In a statement, TikTok called the study a “flawed, non-peer-reviewed experiment… clearly designed to reach a false and predetermined conclusion.”
A TikTok spokesperson added: “Creating fake accounts that interact with the app in a prescribed manner does not reflect the experience of real users, just as this so-called study does not reflect facts or reality.”
In his affidavit, Blackburn, the U.S. intelligence official, said the U.S. concern about content manipulation “is based on actions ByteDance and TikTok have already taken abroad, and (China’s) malign activities in the United States that, while not attributable to ByteDance and TikTok to date, demonstrate its capability and intent to engage in malign foreign influence and theft of sensitive data.”
Participation of the Chinese government
TikTok CEO tells Congress his company has no ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Strider’s analysis highlights the “golden stock” held by Net Investment Chinese (Beijing) Technology Co. The company is jointly owned by the Communist Party-run China Central Radio and Television Station and Beijing’s State-owned Cultural Assets Supervision and Administration Bureau, among other government entities, Strider found.
“Despite the relatively low economic ownership associated with this stake, the special stock includes privileges that give Net Investment Chinese (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. and its government controllers significant influence over ByteDance,” Strider wrote in its analysis.
Among the company’s appointees to the ByteDance subsidiary’s board is Wu Shugang, who “has spent most of his public sector career in propaganda roles since joining China’s Ministry of Education in 2007, according to Chinese government websites and state media reports,” Strider found.
ByteDance said the Chinese subsidiary had to adopt a “special management sharing” agreement to obtain licenses for its social media apps — and that the subsidiary had no say in the parent company’s global operations, including TikTok.
A TikTok spokesperson said: “Everyone knows that all international businesses must comply with the local laws and regulations of the jurisdictions in which they operate.”
In their brief, TikTok’s lawyers did not seek to address the government’s national security concerns, which they called “speculative,” or its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. They framed the case as a conflict solely over free speech.
They cited a Supreme Court decision, issued at the height of the Cold War, that held that the First Amendment prohibited efforts to ban the receipt of “communist political propaganda” from foreign countries.
“Subject to narrow and well-established exceptions that do not apply here, free speech does not lose First Amendment protection because the government deems it false,” they wrote.
“Never before has Congress specifically targeted and banned a specific forum for speech. Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.”
