It’s important to point out that the TikTok young people see in the United States is not the same TikTok that young people see in China.
Jay Solomon writes at the Free Press:
New Report: TikTok Brainwashed America’s YouthSince 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.”
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