TikTok, Censorship, and the Chinese Communist Party
Opinion Analysis by Abrar Salhuba, Staff Writer
April 14th, 2020
We all have heard of TikTok in some capacity. Whether our friends are Tiktokers, or we are, odds are you've seen it trending on social media platforms, or you've just heard of the dance Renegade. The trending dance was performed at the NBA All-Star game by Tiktok’s two most popular users, Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae, who have both been so succesful through the app that they've been able to expand their influence to US pop culture. Either way, you know what TikTok is, and if it's outside your age range (70% of users are between the age of 16-24) (Gunel,2020), then it must have popped up on your newsfeed at some point because is difficult to imagine an app that brings in the valuation of 75 billion has gone by unnoticed. (Savitz,2020) This especially rings true in our current age of technological modernity, where figures are popular and always accounted for and reported on. You might even have an inkling that it’s a Chinese app, and this article is going to delve into the possibility that TikTok is connected to the communist party in China.
Let’s run through the facts first Tiktok was created in 2016 in its Chinese name of Douyin, its owned by a tech giant called Bytedance. It has more than 800 million active users globally and has had more than 1.5 billion downloads on the App Store and Google Play. Bytedance is, as mentioned above, at a value of 75 billion and privately owned. This means that unlike other huge companies, it won't be selling itself to American corporations anytime soon due to being financially capable of holding itself up. This causes a slight concern to the United States because of the app’s invasive terms and conditions while having over 30 million US users on it. (Gunel,2020)
Now let's delve into why Tiktok may or may not be connected to the communist party.
The concern with the potentiality arose when an investigation the Guardian published on September 25 revealed leaked TikTok documents, in which the app was instructing its moderators on censoring videos with topics the Communist party disapproved of such as Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence and Falun Gong. In October, Senator Marco Rubio was quoted on saying, “These Chinese-owned apps are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Government and Community Party,” in a letter addressed to the US Department of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Two more senators also raised the alarm afterward, explaining that Chinese companies were bound by Chinese laws, which gave the government much more leeway on accessing private data than US companies had. According to a memo sent to the Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, Chinese companies must cooperate and support intelligence work led by the Chinese Communist Party.
There exists a 2017 Chinese law that requires all Chinese companies to conform to the Chinese government's intelligence operations if requested. This means that if TikTok was asked by the Communist Party to give them a particular user's private server information, TikTok must obey the command.
This, of course, raises a justifiable question of concern on behalf of all foreign users using the app by their governments, such as the US government exemplified when citing national security concerns in regards to the app. Tiktok has responded to these allegations by stating that all US user data remains in the United States by publishing a statement saying, "We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content, and we would not do so if asked. Period. Our US moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our US policies – just like other US companies in our space.”
However, TikTok’s operations manager in India had replied with a hard "No," when asked if they would allow content critiquing the Prime minister, Narendra Modi, to appear on the app. Furthermore, it was revealed that the app was created with censorship in its structure as a former moderations guideline employee of TikTok disclosed to Vox saying that Tiktok, in the beginning, was designed with an approach to moderate in order to keep content "light" and "fun."
In regards to the field of censorship, when seventeen-year-old Feroza Aziz published a three-part video concerning China’s oppression of the Uighur Muslim population, the videos were deleted. Tiktok responded to this allegation by stating her videos were removed "due to human moderation error. " A TikTok whistleblower sent the German publication, Netzpolitik, documents that revealed instructions to moderators on labeling political content as "not recommended " or "not for feed" and what the second instruction means is that the produced content by users will not appear in other users, For You, page which is the main way that users watch videos and content.
Through this approach, China censors what you see and do through its app TikTok. This was seen when the Hong Kong protests blazing through all social media platforms never appeared on TikTok.
A US college student, Misty Hong, according to the Daily Beast on December 2, as reported by Vox, had filed a lawsuit against TikTok claiming that all her private data had been transferred to servers in China. The data she alleges included information such as her private messages, phone numbers, contacts, browsing histories, cellphone serial numbers, locations, and IP addresses. It is imperative to note that a previous version of TikTok’s privacy policy does say that user data could be sent to China. Misty Hong says that TikTok transferred her information to the servers bugly.qq.com and umeng.com. Misty Hong goes on to say that TikTok uses its source code from companies Baidu and Igexin, which was revealed to be letting spyware on more than 500 Android apps in 2017. TikTok’s terms of service legally give them the right to use the user's work," in any format and on any platform." A right, more than 800 million people, have signed away by opening an account and agreeing to the terms and conditions of TikTok. (Jennings, 2019)
References
Günel, S. (2020, February 6). 12 Facts You Should Know About TikTok. Retrieved from https://medium.com/better-marketing/12-facts-you-should-know-about-tiktok-908f4b8495b
Jennings, R. (2019, December 16). What's going on with TikTok, China, and the US government? Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/open-sourced/2019/12/16/21013048/tiktok-china-national-security-investigation
Savitz, E. J. (2020, January 16). TikTok Revenues Are Exploding. Retrieved from https://www.barrons.com/articles/beware-facebook-tiktok-revenues-are-exploding-51579201752