WSJ Report Highlights Election Misinformation on Chinese-Owned TikTok
A recent report in The Wall Street Journal highlights election misinformation on social media.
The article discusses how social media giant TikTok let accounts linked to the Chinese government spread misleading content targeting U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 election.
TikTok boasts approximately one billion users worldwide — including 135 million or more in the U.S. — making it one of the most popular social media platforms on earth.
However, TikTok and its Chinese-based parent company ByteDance, have come under fire for serving kids a steady “diet of darkness” online and struggling to protect private user data from entities in China, such as the Chinese Communist Party.
The Wall Street Journal‘s report reveals how social media accounts posed as conservative news outlets, sharing videos that mischaracterized elected leaders like President Biden.
Even though TikTok has policies against fake accounts, the article points out that enforcement was slow, allowing misleading content to reach millions of users before being taken down.
All of this underscores the concerns many have expressed in the past about how TikTok might be used to to spread Chinese propaganda.
In 2022, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security sharing concerns about TikTok’s operations in the U.S., saying in part,
TikTok captures vast amounts of private information on users, including American citizens, and has long been suspected of providing the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with potential access to that information. This threatens the safety and security of American citizens, and also functions as an avenue for the Chinese government to track the locations of and develop blackmail on Federal employees and contractors.
U.S. Congressman Bruce Westerman wrote in March,
Although TikTok executives claim that it does not share any data collected by the app, there are several Chinese laws in place that provide CCP [Chinese Communist Party] officials access to all user data collected by Chinese-owned tech companies, like TikTok. This means the CCP has access to sensitive data, like the location of every TikTok user worldwide, including the over 210 million Americans who have downloaded the app.
Last year Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin filed two lawsuits against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance.
The A.G.’s lawsuits allege that TikTok and ByteDance failed to fully disclose that the company is subject to Chinese laws that mandate cooperation with intelligence activities of the People’s Republic of China and that TikTok aggressively collects sensitive user data.
Social media platforms are more than just websites or phone apps. These are multimillion dollar businesses owned and operated by investors and other interests. If the Chinese Communist Party can influence TikTok, the CCP may be able to manipulate content and influence users on one of the world’s largest social media platform. That’s a serious concern.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
