My Finest Hour

I Was Denounced by the Communist Party of China

The Chinese Communist Party, like all Communist Parties, is evil. That such dangerously depraved despots rule over nearly 1.5 billion people is a stain on humanity. Worse, they seek domination beyond their borders and would like nothing more than to corrode the will and the ability of the democratic west to limit the damage they inflict on the rest of humanity.

These figures are not agreed upon by all sources, but most sources concur that the Chinese Communists have killed tens of millions of people, and that does not even include those killed in war.

I have had many accomplishments, awards and honors over the years. I have chaired three different programs at Rutgers, founded a professional society, and advised grad students who have gone on to superb careers inside and outside of academia, and undergraduates who themselves have received awards for their research.

But perhaps the thing I am most proud of, my finest hour, happened about two weeks ago. My (and my collaborators’) research was denounced by the Communist Party of China (hence, CCP) last week.¹ You can find the denunciation here:

An overview of the study appears around 1:40; the denunciation appears around 4:40. “What the Hell?” you may be thinking. Allow me to explain.

The Studies

We conducted two studies as part of a longterm collaboration between my lab at Rutgers and the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies (among other things) propaganda, radicalization, and hate online. You can find the full report here. Two of the co-authors, Danit Finkelstein and Sonia Yanovsky, are two Rutgers graduate students working closely with me.

These studies were a preliminary assessment of whether TikTok functions as a propaganda arm of the CCP. TikTok is a social media platform in which people post videos. It has become wildly popular, with something like 2 billion users worldwide. And it is owned by a Chinese company. Given that China has no guarantees of human rights remotely resembling those of the democratic west, and affords no protections to media (social or otherwise) from government interference and manipulation, this naturally raises the question of whether TikTok is being exploited by the CCP to advance their interests and propaganda.

The findings in this report indicated that it probably is. Although that research was preliminary and is ongoing, here I summarize some of the key findings of that report:

1. Possible Amplification of Pro-China and Irrelevant Content: TikTok appears to amplify frontier influencers (travel and lifestyle content accounts) and irrelevant or clickbait material, to crowd out discussion of CCP-driven ethnic genocide and human rights abuses on its platform.

2. Possible Suppression of Anti-China Content: TikTok's moderation algorithms significantly augment this suppression. The views-to-likes ratio for anti-China content on TikTok was 87% lower than pro-China content even though the content was liked nearly twice as much. This suggests that TikTok is directing users to content regarding China that is quite different from that which most users like.²

3. Likely Cross-Platform Influence Operations: The CCP may be using frontier influencers and state affiliated media to disseminate pro-China narratives to crowd out discussion of human rights abuses on Instagram and YouTube with tourism and culture content.

4. Psychological Indoctrination: A psychological survey of Americans (n=1214) found that, among the platforms studied, TikTok screentime positively and uniquely predicted favorability towards China's human rights record. Notably, heavy users of TikTok (i.e., those with >3 hours of daily screentime) demonstrated a roughly 50% increase in pro-China attitudes compared to non-users. This suggests that TikTok's content may contribute to psychological manipulation of users, aligning with the CCP’s strategic objective of shaping favorable perceptions among young audiences.

5. Strategic Assessment: NCRI assesses that the CCP is deploying algorithmic manipulation in combination with prolific information operations to impact user beliefs and behaviors on a massive scale and that these efforts prove highly successful on TikTok in particular. These findings underscore the urgent need for transparent regulation of social media algorithms, or even the creation of a public trust funded by the platforms themselves to safeguard democratic values and free will.

What We Did: Study 1

We created 24 new accounts designed to mimic searches of 16 year old users. The searches were for terms about which the CCP might be expected to have some … sensitivities. Searches were conducted for “Uyghur” (a mostly Muslim ethnic group sent to concentration camps in western China, see horrific reports [here, here, and here] including rape, forced sterilizations, beatings, removal of children from families), “Xinjiang” (where the Uyghurs are mostly located), “Tibet” (the region the CCP annexed in 1950 and brutally suppressed), and Tiananmen (the public square in Beijing that, in 1989, was the location of large scale pro-democracy protests that were also brutally suppressed by the CCP). To this day, the CCP bans public discussion of this in China.

Searches were then conducted for these terms on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram (Youtube and Instagram are owned by Americans). The key outcome is, “What was produced by these searches? How much content was pro-China, anti-China, irrelevant or netural?”

Here are the key results for searches for Tiananmen:

Searches for Tiananmen on TikTok produced more Pro-China content (red) and less anti-China content (green) than did searches conducted on Youtube and Instagram. They also produced way more irrelevant (grey) + neutral (blue) content, a result we interpreted as essentially deflecting or distracting users away from China’s horrendous suppression of the pro-democracy protests. These latter categories included things like travel and tourist promotion to the area and tangential mention of Tiananmen Square in articles focusing on other topics.

Results were largely consistent with this for the other search terms, though there were some interesting partial exceptions. Here is one:

TikTok yielded way less anti-China content than did the other platforms. TikTok also produced by far the most irrelevant and neutral content, consistent with the idea that distraction is part of the propaganda manipulation method.

However, inconsistent with the propaganda manipulation conclusion were results for pro-China content — Youtube, not TikTok, produced the most pro-China content. What was going on here? From the report:

This anomalously high proportion of pro-China content on YouTube was driven by the fact that 40% of the total content collected emanated from a single account, @uyghurbeauty.

The short version is that our best guess was that this account is a Chinese asset. From the report:

Though passive OSINT techniques do not allow for a definitive identification of the channel’s operator or its real geographic base of operations, it remains an emblematic example of a Chinese media asset that uses its high-reach and high-frequency of posting to co-opt and dominate social chatter around Uyghur-related keywords and hashtags. This modus operandi has effectively skewed YouTube content to nearly 52.6% pro-China, and provides a qualitative contrast to the official media sources (CGTN, South China Morning Post, etc.) that skewed YouTube content for “Xinjiang” to 52% pro-China.

(OSINT refers to Open Source Intelligence — for short, this is openly available stuff that stuff anyone could find if they had the skills, time, and resources; no spies needed).

Spy vs. Spy. We had no spies.

There are many more results like those summarized above in the full report, which I encourage you to read; it is publicly available and free. The results are broadly consistent with, but stopping somewhat short of “proving” CCP manipulation. They stop short of proving manipulation because they are statistical results showing differences between search results by platform. We did not have access to the actual search algorithm of TikTok. We did not have spies sitting in on meetings of TikTok executives or programmers. The gun definitely has smoke coming out of it, but we did not see anyone pull the trigger. Maybe someone stuck a cigarette butt in the barrel.

Study 2

Study 2 was a survey of 1219 American adults conducted through Amazon’s Prime Panels Cloud research Service. This opt-in sample was matched to major American demographics for increased generalizability, though it was not a truly random sample.

It was a correlational study, examining the extent to which TikTok use corresponds with some beliefs and attitudes that the CCP would like people to hold. First, a seemingly innocent result that is probably less innocent than it appears: The more time people spend on TikTok, the more likely they are to have selected China as one of the most desirable travel destinations in the world.

There are lots of good reasons to want to visit China, and it does have many amazing sites and experiences. One could argue it is one of the most desirable travel destinations, but, then one could also argue that so are the Riviera, Mexico (beaches, ancient ruins, pyramids, canyons) , the Alps, the Rockies, Alaska, anywhere in Australia, most of southeast Asia, Japan, Hawai, Iceland, Paris, Barcelona, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and any of a zillion other amazing or beautiful places.

The key issue here is not whether China is or is not a desirable travel destination. Instead, the key issue is that belief that China is one of the most desirable travel destinations increases with time reported spending on TikTok. If only for the tourist income, this is clearly something the CCP would like to encourage. It is also consistent with the “distraction” results shown in Study 1. Searches for nasty CCP behavior disproportionately produces things like tourism promotion on TikTok compared to other platforms. Still, it is possible that there is some other explanation for these findings besides CCP manipulation.

Somewhat more damning are these results:

Respondents who were hardly on TikTok (red), mostly had an appropriately dim view of China’s human rights record. But among respondents who are regularly on TikTok (green) or on TikTok A LOT (blue), lots of people (almost half among those on TikTok for more than 3 hours/day) say China’s human rights record is just jim dandy.

Again, we cannot be sure that Chinese propaganda manipulations of TikTok caused these perception because this is a nonexperimental study that assessed associations between TikTok use and beliefs about China; it did not attempt to test causal hypotheses about TikTok’s influence. However, we have two dots:

1. Dot 1: TikTok produces far fewer search results critical of China and far more irrelevant to CCP human rights abuses than do other platforms.

2. Dot 2: People who spend lots of time on TikTok are far more likely than those who do not to have a favorable view of China’s human rights record.

We are continuing work like this to more clearly hone in on whether these dots are connected.

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Concluding Thoughts

I consider being denounced by the CCP one of the high points of my 40 years doing academic research. For years, they have attempted to infiltrate academia to inject their propaganda and it is just possible that TikTok is an avenue by which they are scaling up their target to — much of the U.S. For years, they funded “Confucius Institutes” at colleges, ostensibly to teach Chinese languages, host cultural events, and advance international cooperation. They certainly did these things, but they were also used to pressure the colleges hosting them to avoid making public statements critical of China or the CCP. Eventually, most colleges closed down the Confucius Institutes. Influencing U.S. politics, culture, and education is clearly in their interest. One does not need our studies to know any of this.

I am deeply grateful that I live in the U.S.A., where I have the freedom to do this type of research and where we all have nearly unlimited freedom to criticize our own government. (Academia is another story, one I write about all the time, so I am not going into that here). I am not afraid of the CCP, but that is not because I am particularly strong or courageous. It is because I live in a country with the resources to go toe to toe with despots and with a political culture and system that, however imperfect, is designed to maximally ensure individual political freedom and has, so far, done a better job with that than just about any place on Earth.

I am too lazy to fact check whether Ben actually said this, but I do not care because the point is exquisite, regardless of its source.

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Footnotes

1. Side benefit: being denounced by the CCP now makes my various academic denouncers “CCP adjacent.”

2. Likes. For the social media uninitiated, users on many platforms have the option of “liking” posts. Shown here is the like button (the heart circled in red) for a TikTok video on Tiananmen Square. One adds one’s voice of approval to posts by clicking the like button/heart.

Typically, algorithms boost posts by making them appear earlier in searches when more people view it and/or like it. Thus, our finding that “the views-to-likes ratio for anti-China content on TikTok was 87% lower than pro-China content even though the content was liked nearly twice as much” is very fishy.