Should China Own TikTok?

To understand why the House of Representatives will vote today on a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the platform, it helps to look at a few recent news stories:

• Despite low unemployment and falling inflation, TikTok is full of viral videos bemoaning the U.S. economy. One popular group of posts uses the term “Silent Depression.” The posts falsely suggest that the country is in worse shape today than it was in 1930. (My colleagues Jeanna Smialek and Jim Tankersley reported on the posts late last year.)

• After Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, TikTok flooded users with videos expressing extreme positions from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tilted toward the Palestinian side, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. “Many stoked fear,” The Journal reported. In November, videos praising an old Osama bin Laden letter also went viral.

• In December, a Rutgers University research group concluded that videos about topics the Chinese government dislikes — including Tibet, Uyghurs, Hong Kong protests and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown — were strangely hard to find on TikTok. All were more prominent on Instagram. “It’s not believable that this could happen organically,” a Rutgers expert told my colleague Sapna Maheshwari.

• On Monday, the top U.S. intelligence official released a report saying that the Chinese government had used TikTok to promote its propaganda to Americans and to influence the 2022 midterm elections. This year, the report warned, China’s ruling Communist Party may try to influence the presidential election and “magnify U.S. societal divisions.”

There does not seem to be any historical precedent for TikTok’s role in the United States today. The platform has become one of the country’s biggest news sources, especially for people younger than 30, and has collected vast amounts of information about Americans. TikTok is also owned by a company, ByteDance, that’s based in a country that is America’s biggest rival for global power: China.

A Soviet NBC?

ByteDance executives say that they operate separately from China’s government and that they regularly remove misleading content from TikTok. But many independent experts are skeptical that ByteDance is truly independent.

China’s government has a well-documented history of treating companies as extensions of its ruling party, especially under Xi Jinping, the current leader. And Xi has made clear that he views the U.S. as a threat to China’s interests. The most likely scenario, experts say, is that officials aligned with the Chinese government shape TikTok’s algorithm to influence what content Americans see.

With any one viral video or trending hashtag on TikTok, it is impossible to know whether China’s government is playing a role. Some of the videos go viral on Instagram too, for instance. But there does seem to be a pattern. The most sensitive subjects for Beijing — such as Tibet and the Uyghurs — are hard to find on the platform. Information that is consistent with Beijing’s narratives — such as its pro-Hamas tilt and its criticism of the U.S. economy — circulates more widely than the opposite.

(Related: After experts noted the platform’s apparent bias in the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok curtailed the tool that had made the analysis possible.)