[onei]

Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.

[alisonatwork]

I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.

Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.

[suraci]

> Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP

I can't say it's not at all

But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good.

If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now

I've talked abt how CPC doing propaganda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769

[froh]

ccp bans certain brain rot contents which the algorithms hm happily spreads in the west.

the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.

[tmnvdb]

There is good evidence that topics the CCP does not like are significantly underrepresented compared to other social media platforms.

I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.

[dqv]

You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence. If you're talking about the study about hash tag counts, that's not good evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-mislea...

[blackeyeblitzar]

Yes, read about the kind of things employees of TikTok have to agree to. The summary is that they essentially have to uphold the goals of the Chinese government. They also have two different managers, one in America and a second handler from mainland China.

https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...