Inspired by the cat thread. Let's talk about TikTok and their involvement with the Chinese government.
Let's start with the basics. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a chinese AI research company. Not a media company, not team of social media experts, an AI research lab.
ByteDance's core product, Toutiao ("Headlines"), is a content platform in China and worldwide. Toutiao started out as a news recommendation engine and gradually evolved into a platform delivering content in a variety of formats. Toutiao offers its users personalized information feeds that are powered by machine learning algorithms. A content feed is updated based on what the machine learns about a user’s reading preferences.
ByteDance’s research arm, the AI lab was founded in March 2016 and is headed by Wei-Ying Ma, former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia. The lab’s research focuses on AI for understanding information (text, images, videos) in depth, and developing large scale machine learning algorithms for personalized information recommendations. Its main research areas include Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Speech and Audio, Knowledge and Data Mining, Distributed System and Networking, and Computer Graphics.
TikTok is hugely popular among teens in the US and Europe with over 120,000,000 downloads in the US alone. However there are concerns that content is being censored based on demands from the Chinese government.
The app has quickly become a viral online hit, installed more than 1.4 billion times around the world and more than 120 million times in the U.S., according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower. Its U.S. downloads in the Apple and Google app stores have beaten or matched its more established rivals, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
“I remain deeply concerned that any platform or application that has Chinese ownership or direct links to China, such as TikTok, can be used as a tool by the Chinese Communist Party to extend its authoritarian censorship of information outside China’s borders and amass data on millions of unsuspecting users,”
So these are their concerns. But are these things actually happening?
Of course TikTok denies these allegations and assures us that everything is okay since they have separate datacenters for users located outside of China.
However inside China, TikTok is openly being used as a tool for spreading propaganda...
In the West, ByteDance-owned TikTok is usually seen as goofy fun for tweens wanting to shoot videos of themselves singing along to their favorite pop stars. In China, things are a little different.
Promo video of a Chinese military drill in Hong Kong started making the rounds on patriotic sections of China’s TikTok
The first thing Jeffrey Ding saw when he opened his new account on the Chinese version of TikTok, known as Douyin, was a video of the Chinese army seemingly attacking protesters on the streets in Hong Kong.
Again, representatives from TikTok assure us that their Chinese and Western platforms are completely separate and the Chinese government has never requested that they remove content from TikTok. They claim that their content guidelines are based on the local laws of whatever country users are from, but they also recently banned all LGBT content from users in Turkey despite homosexuality being legal there.
And an entire section of the rules was devoted to censoring depictions of homosexuality. “Intimate activities (holding hands, touching, kissing) between homosexual lovers” were censored, as were “reports of homosexual groups, including news, characters, music, tv show, pictures”. Similarly blocked was content about “protecting rights of homosexuals (parade, slogan, etc.)” and “promotion of homosexuality”. In all those guidelines, TikTok went substantially further than required by law.
What do you think about all this?