Since its U.S. launch in 2018, people have worried that the Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok is vacuuming up data on America’s teenagers and transforming them into modern, digital versions of the throngs who once enthusiastically waved Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.
Now, an updated study conducted by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)—provided exclusively to The Free Press—finds that those fears may be justified.
The new research is being released as the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments this week about whether the U.S. site must be sold or shut down. TikTok, owned by the Chinese media giant ByteDance, is arguing that federal legislation forcing a sale by January 19 is an unconstitutional limit on free speech. (A lawyer for Donald Trump has asked the Court to delay the sale date so the president-elect can pursue “a political resolution.”)
A preliminary version of the study was released in August and “faced significant pushback,” according to Joel Finkelstein, director and chief science officer at NCRI. The updated study has “twice as much evidence,” he said, and will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Social Psychology. “It is now the first peer-reviewed, data-driven study to establish that TikTok is actively manipulating perceptions of China and the Chinese Communist Party through algorithmic bias.”
The researchers found that TikTok significantly downplayed negative content related to China, such as Beijing’s bloody 1989 crackdown on democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square and the government’s treatment of its minority population of Uyghurs in the western Xinjiang province.
The report presents TikTok as an example of the “persuasive technologies” China is developing to shape public opinion in the West. Another major conclusion of the report, based on online polling, found that the more time users spent on TikTok, the more positively they viewed China’s human rights record and its desirability as a travel destination.
“This scaled indoctrination isn’t hypothetical. It’s real,” Finkelstein told The Free Press. “I think that the Supreme Court hearing now isn’t about whether or not we’re dealing with a hypothetical threat. The Supreme Court hearing is about whether we’re going to allow this continued indoctrination.”
According to NCRI, more than 80 percent of the content generated in an Instagram search on the Uyghurs was negative toward China, compared to around 11 percent on TikTok. A search for “Tiananmen” on YouTube, meanwhile, generated content that was 65 percent negative for the Chinese government, compared to just 20 percent on TikTok.
The “results strongly suggest that algorithmic amplification of pro- and anti-CCP content on Instagram and YouTube is largely determined by commercial consideration, whereas advancing CCP propaganda plays some role in the algorithmic curation of TikTok content,” the study reads.
TikTok has more than 170 million users in the U.S. and over a billion globally. It played a major role in the 2024 presidential campaign and is widely used by American companies and organizations to sell their services and products.
To judge how TikTok treated various topics, NCRI created fake TikTok accounts to fit the profile of American teenagers. The researchers then engaged the TikTok algorithm on issues related to the Chinese government and CCP and compared the search results to those generated by the site’s main rivals, YouTube and Instagram—which are owned by the U.S. tech giants Google and Meta, respectively.
The report says searches on TikTok generated videos and other content that was significantly more positive or neutral than what was found during searches on these other sites. Rather than finding political content, for example, TikTok generated videos about Chinese culture or tourism.
A TikTok spokesman strongly criticized the NCRI report and the methodology used in the study. “This flawed experiment was clearly engineered to reach a false, predetermined conclusion,” he told The Free Press. “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.”
The Chinese embassy in Washington also denied that the Beijing government plays any role in TikTok’s operations. “The claim that ‘TikTok is essentially serving Beijing’s interests’ has no factual basis and is full of prejudice and malicious speculation against China,” a spokesman said. He added that 60 percent of ByteDance is owned by international investors and that TikTok “is fully registered in accordance with U.S. law, operates legally and in compliance with regulations, and is subject to U.S. supervision.”
Criticism of TikTok is hardening on Capitol Hill as the January 19 deadline nears and lobbying intensifies on all sides. Small businesses and companies in the U.S. are preparing to comply with the TikTok ban, should it go into effect this month. Many federal employees are already banned from using TikTok on their government devices, as are many federal contractors. A majority of the states have also banned the app on governmental devices.
“The same people concerned about China owning American farmland should be concerned that China already owns 170 million properties on Americans’ phones,” U.S. Representative Kat Cammack (R-FL), an original co-sponsor of the House TikTok bill, told The Free Press. “This has far-reaching national security implications for generations.”
Cammack accused TikTok of using strong-arm tactics in its battle with Congress—including pressuring users of the app to lobby lawmakers or risk losing access to their accounts. “My office received hundreds of phone calls from young constituents not even knowing why they were calling in the first place,” she said.
TikTok, in a letter to Congress last year, acknowledged it sent messages to certain users regarding their rights to petition their lawmakers about the legislation. But the company denied threatening to restrict access to the app. “No one was forced to enter their zip code or contact their representative to use TikTok,” the letter said.
A number of recent studies have raised concerns about China’s development of information warfare capabilities, including harvesting data on potential adversaries and secretly seeking to influence their leadership and populations. This is achieved through the deployment of troll farms, online influencers, and seemingly commercial social media and advertising sites.
A November report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute tracked the activity of dozens of Chinese companies engaged in ideological training, online emotional detection, and managing public opinion. Many of the firms tracked by the institute either have commercial ties to the Chinese military and the CCP or are partly owned by them.
“The rapid adoption of persuasive technologies,” the report concludes, “will challenge national security in ways that are difficult to predict. This presents malign actors with the ability to sway opinions and actions without the conscious autonomy of users.”
