Reality Check Commentary: Beijing Doesn’t Deserve To Keep Regulating TikTok, Which Spreads Misinformation 20 Percent of the Time — and Is Banned in China
"The debate in Washington about what to do about TikTok is not about hypothetical harms," writes NewsGuard Co-CEO Gordon Crovitz
Welcome to a special edition of NewsGuard's Reality Check, a report on how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
Beijing Doesn’t Deserve To Keep Regulating TikTok, Which Spreads Misinformation 20 Percent of the Time — and Is Banned in China
By Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard Co-CEO
In an overwhelming, bipartisan vote, the U.S. House of Representatives declared that TikTok must find a new owner other than one ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. President Joe Biden said he supports the move, and the bill now goes to the Senate.
TikTok spreads misinformation almost 20 percent of the time: The debate in Washington about what to do about TikTok is not about hypothetical harms. NewsGuard research over the years has shone a harsh light on TikTok as a misinformation superspreader.
In one report, NewsGuard analysts mimicked how TikTok users interact with the video platform by analyzing 540 TikTok results based on reviewing the top 20 results from 27 searches on topics in the news. Of the search results, NewsGuard found that 105 videos — 19.4 percent — contained false or misleading claims. Our conclusion:
“Does mugwort induce abortion? Can and should I make hydroxychloroquine in my kitchen? Was the 2020 election stolen? Did Ukrainians fake the civilian deaths in Bucha? If you search on TikTok, you might think the answers to these questions are all, ‘Yes.’”
No Western brand is safe: Another report showed that TikTok has become a superspreader of misinformation about brands and companies. NewsGuard analysts searched nine major brands — Anheuser-Busch, Balenciaga, Barilla, Bud Light, Chick-fil-A, Heineken, Hobby Lobby, Kohl’s, and Target — and discovered that videos that shared misinformation about these brands were cumulatively viewed 57 million times over a one-week period, with nearly half of the views being of videos that used AI-generated or otherwise manipulated media to advance misinformation.
In total, NewsGuard found that 14 percent of the videos about these brands contained false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims targeting the brands themselves. How’s that for undermining confidence in the flow of trusted information needed for free markets?
Misinformation is at the heart of the national security arguments, as summarized by Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group:
TikTok parent company ByteDance answers to the CCP
Beijing can weaponize Americans’ data
It's in Xi Jinping’s best interest to control the algorithm … and further polarize the American public
The Economist reminds us that only Americans can own U.S. broadcasters and that social media controlled by a hostile government is more insidious than control of older media. “A newspaper’s editorial line can be seen in black and white; by contrast, every TikTok user gets a different feed, and the company does not provide adequate tools to examine its output in aggregate,” making it impossible to know “whether TikTok’s algorithm is responding to users’ preferences, or to manipulation from Beijing.”
China is quickly catching up to the Russians in perfecting the art of disinformation. For example, government-run China Daily published a video falsely claiming that the U.S. operates a bioweapons lab in Kazakhstan with the goal of infecting camels with a deadly virus that the camels would spread to China when they migrate.
Even China bans TikTok: The Chinese government accuses the U.S. of xenophobia for considering a law to force ByteDance to get an owner not regulated by Beijing. But even China bans TikTok in China. A similar app from ByteDance that is allowed in China, Douyin, is heavily censored, with Beijing putting a heavy hand on what’s said. Under pressure from the Chinese government, Douyin only provides child-safe content to users under 14 years old who can only use the app 40 minutes a day and not between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. If the House’s TikTok bill bogs down in the Senate, here’s language for an alternative: “No social media platform may operate in the United States if it is not allowed to operate under the same restrictions or lack thereof in its home country.”
TikTok is not the only social media platform that operates in the dark, refusing to provide transparent data about its algorithms or to empower its users with information about who’s feeding them the news or how much of this “news” is false. But there are two big differences: U.S.-based social media companies have First Amendment rights to which the Chinese Communist Party is not entitled. And while the Silicon Valley platforms are guilty of spreading misinformation, at least they do not answer to a hostile authoritarian government deploying disinformation as a tool against the U.S. and its allies.
Gordon Crovitz is the Co-CEO and Co-Editor-In-Chief of NewsGuard. Previously, he was publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
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