Regular users of the short-video app Douyin, the Chinese-language version of TikTok, are more likely to subscribe to narratives that favor the Chinese government, according to research published this month in Taiwan.
In a public opinion poll released on December 11, 18.2 percent of respondents identified themselves as Chinese-speaking TikTok users, who were active on the app an average of 4.4 days per week.
Respondents in that group were more likely, by up to 10 percentage points or more, to agree with arguments that cast skepticism on the United States while leaning toward China’s political positions, according to the results published by Taiwan’s Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a nonprofit specializing in fact-checking and disinformation on Chinese-language social media.
The commissioned poll was conducted by the Survey Research Center at National Chung Cheng University from October 2-21, when it collected 1,129 valid samples with a margin of error of 2.92 percent.
The survey of adults over the age of 20, Taiwan’s legal voting age, found overall favorability tilting toward the U.S. at 63.6 percent versus 16.2 for China.
Chinese-speaking TikTok users, however, agreed in majorities or pluralities with frames including the belief that the Taiwanese government’s closer relations with the U.S. were “provoking China,” and therefore more likely to lead to a conflict across the Taiwan Strait.
They also agreed that Taiwan’s economic prosperity would require the signing of various trade deals with Beijing, the results showed.
Around the world, TikTok has more than 1 billion monthly active users, the company said in September 2021.
Douyin, its Chinese-language cousin, had around 750 million monthly active users as of May this year, according to analytics service QuestMobile, based in Beijing.
This past February, Kepios, a Singapore-based advisory firm, said Taiwan had 5.33 million users over the age of 18, nearly a quarter of Taiwan’s population of 24 million.
According to IORG, 69.5 percent of respondents in its survey said they sometimes or often hear that China “steals personal data” through TikTok or similar apps—an allegation the company denies.
In Taiwan, as in the U.S. and other Western countries, TikTok has been banned on government devices over cybersecurity concerns linked to the app’s parent company in Beijing, ByteDance.
Newsweek asked ByteDance for comment via email.
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A study published on December 21 by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University’s Miller Center on Policing and Community Resilience concluded there was “a strong possibility that TikTok systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese government.”
TikTok’s content was “either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government,” according to the report’s authors, who analyzed the app’s most popular politics-related hashtags.
“Future research should aim towards a more comprehensive analysis to determine the potential influence of TikTok on popular public narratives,” they said.
“Should such research determine that TikTok users exhibit attitudes and assessments of world events aligned with the information distortions that we have discovered, democracies will need to consider appropriate countermeasures to better protect information integrity and mitigate potential real-world impacts,” the researcher said.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.