Margaret Sullivan was having fun. The Washington Post media critic and former public editor of the New York Times collaborated in the production of a humorous musical video on TikTok earlier this month. “You hardened journos may think this is pointless,” she tweeted, “but the street cred I now have with my 12-year-old twin goddaughters...” A few days later, another Washington Post TikTok popped up, tweeted by Dave Jorgenson, the Post’s in-house TikTok expert. In it, happy newsroom faces flash by in a series of quick cuts, with the notable exception of a deadpan Marty Baron, the paper’s executive editor.
Set to upbeat music, these quirky videos seem relatively harmless. They’re simple promotional vehicles, and they attract young TikTok-loving audiences. But America’s journalists, like America’s youth, are falling in love with the most effective medium ever introduced to extend Chinese media practices into the United States. Journalists should not be promoting a platform with a documented history of political censorship. Nor should journalists use TikTok as a news medium, because TikTok—unlike other attempts to extend authoritarian media globally, such as RT (Russia Today)—relies on its users’ ignorance of its origins and practices. How many teens, or journalists, are aware TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance, paid the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for invading the privacy of underage users?
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TikTok seems like a great new media story, and, in some ways, it is. For a relatively new social media platform, TikTok’s numbers are staggering. It is the No. 1 app downloaded in the iOS store, and it’s estimated that in the first quarter of 2019, more than 220 million TikTok app downloads occurred between Google Play and Apple’s iOS store. Funny TikTok memes pop up on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as well as in its proprietary app. If TikTok seems like it’s everywhere these days, that’s because Bytedance spends a fortune to keep teens hooked and to keep everyone else talking about it. In September, TikTok was the top advertiser on Snapchat, and the second-largest advertiser on Youtube. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bytedance plans to spend an astounding $1 billion advertising TikTok this year.
But from a journalistic perspective, the question of what can’t be found on TikTok is more important than the quirky music videos that dominate the app. TikTok, which is called Douyin in China, is the first successful global social media giant pioneered domestically under the Chinese censorship regime, and since the app’s introduction, questions have swirled about what videos are allowed to appear on the platform. According to internal documents describing TikTok’s guidelines obtained by the Guardian—policies that TikTok now claims are outdated and no longer employed—TikTok censored videos mentioning taboo topics in China, such as Tiananmen Square, Tibetan and Taiwanese independence and the Falun Gong. Likewise, videos and hashtags about the Hong Kong protests “barely exist on TikTok,” the Washington Post noted. A former TikTok content moderator told the New York Times that, in the newspaper’s words, “managers in the United States had instructed moderators to hide videos that included any political messages or themes, not just those related to China.”
TikTok is both an audacious attempt to extend Chinese global media reach and a fun app that promotes joy. Those two realities aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re symbiotic. According to the documents obtained by the Guardian, TikTok censored numerous subjects that extend beyond the obvious topics deemed dangerous to the Chinese state. According to the Guardian’s reporting on the directives in the documents, TikTok suppressed videos about “a specific list of 20 ‘foreign leaders or sensitive figures’ including Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung, Mahatma Gandhi, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Kim Jong-un, [and] Shinzo Abe.” Think of how much social media vitriol is generated by figures on that list, and it’s easy to understand why a fun app would want to blacklist those politically divisive figures.
After the documents were revealed, the company issued a statement denying it continues its previous policies. “Let us be very clear,” the company said, “TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period. Our U.S. moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our U.S. policies—just like other U.S. companies in our space. We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”
Still, despite TikTok’s new claims to be observing standard U.S. media practices, it’s clear that until very recently TikTok more closely monitored its content than its American social media competitors did. Even if TikTok might not formally remove content, the former content moderator interviewed by the New York Times noted that TikTok employed what’s commonly known as “shadow banning,” a practice that would allow “such political posts to remain on users’ profile pages but … prevent them from being shared more widely in TikTok’s main video feed.”
The global debate over the tension between free expression and social harmony is seemingly playing out everywhere today. China’s enormous economic leverage has created new parameters for conduct and behavior by business partners seeking access to the Chinese market. Just as the NBA had to very carefully navigate a tweet by a Houston Rockets executive supporting the Hong Kong protests that infuriated the Chinese state, so too must Hollywood producers, video game corporations, book and newspaper publishers, and numerous other businesses navigate Chinese censorship demands. These demands are becoming more common and more insistent, and on platforms like TikTok, they’ll no doubt continue to emerge.
Chinese censorship has gone global. Just as the U.S. government spent the second half of the 20th century encouraging the global expansion of American values, such as freedom of expression, the Chinese government has now opened the first half of the 21st century by promoting global restrictions intended to ensure approving portrayals of Chinese state authority. The consequences of this evolution in global media culture arise almost daily. When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg proclaims the importance of free speech, as he did recently in a speech at Georgetown University, his implicit target is the Chinese regime that bans Facebook, not progressives who want Facebook to more tightly regulate political advertising and hate speech. Facebook, it should be noted, will soon launch “Lasso,” a direct competitor to TikTok.
In recent public pronouncements and congressional hearings, some U.S. politicians argue Twitter and Facebook are, in fact, doing too little to combat the dangerous spread of misinformation and inflammatory propaganda. Under this line of thinking, moderation policies like TikTok’s might offer a remedy to America's social media ills. Senator Kamala Harris, for example, has called for Twitter to shutter President Donald Trump’s account because of what she says are his violations of Twitter’s terms of service. Zuckerberg had no answer when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked him whether Facebook would prohibit political advertisements featuring provable and obvious lies.
This battle between free expression and policing of content is playing out within TikTok, too. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that ISIS uploaded gruesome torture and beheading videos—set to danceable music and accompanied with celebratory emojis—to TikTok. The videos were not detected and deleted by TikTok until the newspaper made the company aware of their existence. By then, they had been shared thousands of times. When terrorists and criminals violate terms of service by spreading messages or portraying crimes that directly inspire violence through algorithmic networks, some level of content control might be deemed legitimate even by libertarian critics. Questions like these speak to the most fundamental notions of what constitutes an ethical and responsible public sphere and how a society should organize and regulate its media.
Democracy and efficiency often sit in conflict. The issues arising with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter are forcing every nation and society to calibrate its tolerance for media freedom on a spectrum that runs from the protection of liberty through the encouragement of accuracy to the enforcement of harmony.
It’s the responsibility of journalists to explain this context, and right now, they’re falling down on the job. Not long ago, the New York Times published a largely celebratory article about TikTok and its embrace by American high school students and educators. The reporter, Taylor Lorenz, noted parenthetically that TikTok’s corporate owner Bytedance is a “Chinese tech conglomerate,” but nowhere was TikTok’s history of censorship of content inimical to the Chinese state’s authority mentioned.
Perhaps more important, nowhere did Lorenz mention TikTok paid a $5.7 million fine to the U.S. government earlier this year. The fine, paid to settle violations identified by the FTC, involved the illegal collection of “names, email addresses, pictures and locations of kids under age 13,” as the Washington Post reported, adding that it was “a record penalty for violations of the nation’s child privacy law.” One would think a feature article celebrating a social media app’s enormous popularity among American teens would note that it had not only demographically targeted users younger than 13, but that it had also admitted illegally collecting information about them.
For users who might consider employing TikTok in schools—and news sites—around America, the inclusion of such relevant information is essential. The general tone of the piece would not have to change at all; TikTok is, in many ways, a liberating social technology that brings much joy to the lives of millions of American teenagers. But it’s also a Chinese social media program that’s settled with the FTC for illegally collecting information on underage users, has a history of censoring user-generated content, and is now said to be under investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a governmental review panel. That national security investigation is looking into how the app sends data back to China.
Just as any article about Facebook would be incomplete if it ignored Facebook’s history of apologies for admitted privacy violations, any article about TikTok that omits its record of censorship and illegal behavior is irresponsible.
This might be the juncture where TikTok and its American counterparts meet. None of the social media giants, whether American or Chinese, wants to reveal embarrassing information about how it actually conducts its work as media. Yet it seems clear all social media—whether TikTok, Weibo, Facebook or Twitter—privilege state or corporate authority above the public’s interest. That makes them terrific vehicles for advertising and propaganda.
It also means the need for independent, comprehensive and critical reporting about these apps is vital. Watching journalists vie to become “TikTok famous” like high school teenagers isn’t encouraging.