As the TikTok US divestment bill looms, many questions remain, including what exactly the case against the app is and what prompted US senators to vote overwhelmingly in favour of a bill that would force the app to either sell to the US or be banned from the region altogether.
That’s because, while there’s been a lot of speculation that TikTok may be sharing U.S. user data with its Chinese parent company to promote pro-China stories (and censor anti-China ones), TikTok itself has denied all allegations, and so far there seems to be no evidence to prove any such misuse has occurred.
Or is there one?
In unsealed court documents related to the proposed TikTok sale last weekend, the U.S. Department of Justice said TikTok Tracking US user opinions on sensitive issuesThe company shared that information with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which is required to provide similar information to the Chinese government upon request.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal,
“The Justice Department said its conclusion that TikTok tracks sensitive views was based on its discovery of software tools that allowed U.S. employees of TikTok and ByteDance to collect information about users based on their content, including their opinions on subjects such as gun control, abortion and religion.
The program, called “Lark,” allows ByteDance employees to monitor user responses to various subjects and flag accounts based on users’ opinions and behavior.
Several former TikTok and ByteDance employees have acknowledged the existence of the Lark system, which requires users’ data to be sent to China for processing. Among other things, TikTok employees Track users People who watched gay content.
The Department of Justice alleges that evidence shows TikTok used these insights to target users with propaganda within the app at the direction of the Chinese government, while censoring certain content at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.
This, as we’ve noted, has long been speculated about. In 2019, The Guardian reported on TikTok’s internal moderation guidelines, which TikTok staff The Chinese government censors videos that mention the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, etc. TikTok denies the allegations but points out that some of these guidelines only apply within China and do not apply to the app itself (TikTok is only available outside of China).
But concerns clearly remain, and TikTok appears to have the means and incentive to use those insights to influence user opinions.
And given the influence the Chinese government has over the local version of the app, called Douyin, and efforts by Chinese government groups to sway the opinions of Western users on virtually every other social app, it seems reasonable to think that TikTok would be the perfect vehicle for a similar move.
Therefore, based on these findings, the threat posed by TikTok is not to track general user data within the app and learn what users are personally interested in, but to understand the political sensitivities of specific user groups and plant potential narratives favorable to the Chinese Communist Party.
So while many TikTok supporters have criticized the U.S. government for forcing the app to be sold, there is a clear logic to support the Department of Justice’s position, based on insider insight.
Is TikTok being used to influence people’s opinions as instructed by the Chinese Communist Party? It’s nearly impossible to know because TikTok’s algorithms are personalized, so every user’s experience is different. So you might not feel influenced, or think you shouldn’t be. But it might not be as blatant as you think, and you might not be targeted like that.
Or, as TikTok puts it, it could be nothing at all.
TikTok is challenging the ruling in order to continue operating in the US, and the court must now decide.
