Interview | ‘TikTok must be banned, it’s a massive influence operation’: Expert on Chinese app

As the debate around TikTok has resurfaced, the Chinese social media platform must stay banned as it is a massive influence operation of the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to Prasiddha Sudhakar, a researcher of disinformation at the nonpartisan Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).

Amid suggestions that India may reconsider the ban on TikTok in the wake of
signs of improvement in the India-China relationship, a scholar of disinformation and state propaganda has warned that the Chinese social media platform must stay banned as it remains a tool of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

TikTok must stay banned as it remains a massive influence operation of the CPC and its entire goal is very clearly to propagate pro-China narratives, says Prasiddha Sudhakar, a disinformation researcher at the nonpartisan Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).

Sudhakar flagged the absence of any transparency on TikTok and said that the platform pushes pro-China narratives — something empirically shown in
peer-reviewed research conducted at NCRI.

“There is no transparency in TikTok that we see across other platforms, and there’s huge discrepancies in the way that they allow, let’s say, materials about Tibet or Xinjiang, compared to other mainstream platforms,” Sudhakar tells Firstpost.

Watch Sudhakar’s interview with Firstpost’s Madhur Sharma here in which she explains how China gains unfairly from TikTok.

In the paper ‘Information manipulation on TikTok and its relation to American users’ beliefs about China’ in Frontiers in Social Psychology, NCRI researchers published results of three studies that found that TikTok artificially served users pro-CPC content and censored content critical of the CPC.

In the first study, researchers looked at the prevalence of TikTok showing content on topics sensitive to the CPC compared to Instagram and YouTube. They found that TikTok showed much more pro-CPC content and much less anti-CPC content than Instagram and YouTube.

In the second study, researchers checked whether TikTok produced content based on user behaviour as every social media and video hosting platform like Instagram and YouTube does. This means that if you watch videos of dogs and cats, these platforms recommend you more videos of dogs and cats.

However, researchers found that despite liking and commenting on anti-CPC content four times more, TikTok showed three times more pro-CPC content.

This clearly suggested that propagating pro-CPC views was woven into the app’s character.

In the third study, researchers found that such techniques of TikTok were CPC’s favourable perception among users as they found that the more time users spent on TikTok, the more positively they viewed China’s human rights record and China as a travel destination.