Chinese-owned video platform TikTok censors users, social and political topics, report finds
Chinese-owned video app TikTok engages in the censorship of users, political issues, and suppresses certain content, a report has found. It comes as Victorian parents have been told to keep kids off the app because of a graphic suicide video circulating.
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Popular Chinese-owned video platform TikTok is a “powerful political actor with global reach” engaging in censorship of users, according to a new report.
Researchers from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) found the app engages in censorship on political and social topics and actively demotes and suppresses content so it was harder to find.
TikTok — owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance — has come under increasing scrutiny from the Australian Government after the Herald Sun revealed a push from some federal MPs to have the app banned.
It has already been banned in India and US President Donald Trump last issued an executive order Friday giving ByteDance 90 days to either sell or spin off TikTok to a US company.
The report stated almost 700 million now use the app across the word including more than 5 million in Australia.
“Case studies in this report show how discussions related to LGBTIQ+ issues, Xijiang and protects currently occurring in the US, for examples, are being affected by censorship and the curation and control of information,” the report states.
“Leaked content moderation documents have previously revealed that TikTok has instructed ‘its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong’, among other censorship rules.”
The report also revealed both WeChat and TikTok’s parent companies Tencent and ByteDance were subject to China’s security, intelligence, counterespionage and cybersecurity laws.
“Internal Chinese Community party committees at both companies are in place to ensure that the party’s political goals are pursued alongside the companies’ commercial goals,” the report states.
“ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has stated on the record that he will ensure his products serve to promote the CCP’s propaganda agenda.
The report authored by ASPI researchers Fergus Ryan, Audrey Fritz and Daria Impiombato released also slammed TikTok for its extreme control of content.
“TikTok is the first globally popular social media network to take a heavy-handed approach to content moderation,” the report read.
“Possessing and deploying the ability to covertly control information flows, across geographical regions, topics and languages, positions TikTok as a powerful political actor with global reach.”
TikTok’s Australian operations have repeatedly denied the Chinese Communist Party had access to any of its users data.
It wrote to federal MPs this year urging them not to use TikTok as a “political football” amid rising tensions between Beijing and Canberra.
TikTok will be hauled before the Foreign Interference through Social Media senate inquiry in coming months.
The report also found WeChat, that boats about 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide, was used by the Chinese Communist Party to assert control over Chinese people living overseas.
“The app has become the long arm of the Chinese regime, extending the PRC’s techno-authoritarian teach into the lives of its citizens and non-citizens in the diaspora,” the report read.
“WeChat users outside of China are increasingly finding themselves trapped in a mobile extension of the Great Firewall of China though which they’re subjected to surveillance, censorship and propaganda.”
It comes as TikTok is struggling to remove a video of a man taking his own life from its platform, days after the graphic clip was first streamed live on Facebook.
The deeply disturbing video is still being shared on the network seven hours after it first appeared, and parenting experts are recommending they keep their teens off the platform today to avoid harm while the network removes it.
The graphic video, showing 33-year-old US man taking his own life, was allegedly first streamed live on Facebook on August 31.
But clips of the man’s suicide are now being shared in some TikTok videos that are being actively suggested and shown to users without warning, causing distress among users.
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Originally published as Chinese-owned video platform TikTok censors users, social and political topics, report finds