The move raises concerns about the independence of NBC’s coverage.
The move raises concerns about the independence of NBC’s coverage.
N BCUniversal is partnering with TikTok to promote its coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The popular social-media app is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, which has raised national-security concerns. This news, which was first reported by industry-specific outlets such as TechCrunch, PRWeek, and AdAge, is almost guaranteed to exacerbate concerns that NBC, which holds exclusive rights to broadcast the games, will deliver a major propaganda victory to the Chinese Communist Party.
In a press release issued yesterday, NBCUniversal reportedly announced that its partnership with TikTok will center around exclusive, original content to be promoted on its various TikTok accounts. Meanwhile, NBCUniversal’s advertising partners will be part of a new ad strategy on the platform surrounding the Olympics — TechCrunch speculates that this could revolve around shopping on the platform.
“While this partnership does present unique opportunities for NBCUniversal advertisers, it also includes a robust slate of content that NBC will share across its TikTok accounts, including daily posts showcasing everything from highlights to topical trends, and three livestreams hosted by a TikTok creator,” a spokesperson for TikTok told TechCrunch.
The partnership between the U.S. broadcaster and the Chinese-owned social-media company comes at a fraught time, as NBC already faces criticism for promoting the Beijing Olympics. Anyone using TikTok, especially athletes and others traveling to China for the Olympics, should be concerned about the app’s ownership. Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told National Review that, “TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and all companies in China — whether public or private — are beholden to the Chinese government, given how things work in China.”
Human-rights groups and U.S. lawmakers in particular have complained that NBC’s coverage of the games could inadvertently promote Chinese propaganda narratives. The network has responded by saying that it would take the “geopolitical context” of the Olympics into account.
However, members of Congress still question NBC’s plans for the massive sporting event. Just earlier today, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Bob Latta, the top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Communications and Technology Committee, respectively, wrote to NBC asking the network to detail the CCP’s influence over its coverage: “As NBCUniversal begins its coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics, we believe viewers and listeners deserve to understand whether your programming has been influenced by the IOC or the Chinese Communist Party.”
The TikTok partnership is sure to heighten worries of CCP influence over NBC given the national-security concerns surrounding the app, which the Trump administration attempted to ban in 2020. Those attempts were held up in court, prompting the Biden administration to abandon that effort and instead review U.S. users’ data security more holistically. That process is ongoing.
One of the main concerns is that TikTok could send U.S. users’ data to China. During the court proceedings surrounding a Trump-era TikTok-ban order, it came to light that TikTok backs up U.S. user data on Singapore-based servers operated by Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company that is susceptible to pressure from the party. The app’s user-data policy does not prohibit the company from sending U.S. users’ data — including biometric information and location data — to a China-focused subsidiary of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, which is subject to Chinese laws requiring it to comply with all government requests for data. This aspect of TikTok’s data-privacy policy was put on full display when Senator Ted Cruz questioned the company’s head of global public policy last year, as NR reported at the time.
In addition to that, ByteDance has previously censored content and search results relevant to Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, and other topics sensitive to the Chinese government on the TikTok app in the U.S. The Financial Times later reported that a former Chinese diplomat led ByteDance’s content-policy team during a period that overlapped with TikTok censorship scandals.
TikTok itself isn’t available in China, but ByteDance offers a separate app in China called Douyin, which has previously worked with Chinese government propaganda offices to promote Beijing’s narratives on the Uyghur genocide. ByteDance controls TikTok’s algorithm and employs staffers who serve both the parent company and the international-facing app, as CNBC has reported. ByteDance also hosts an internal Chinese Communist Party committee helmed by a vice president of the company. Internal party committees work within Chinese companies to promote party orthodoxy.
NBCUniversal and TikTok announced their partnership against the backdrop of increasing concern about the security situation at the Olympics. Already, a spate of stories has emerged documenting how athletes, journalists, and other foreigners in China for the Olympics plan to use “burner” devices to avoid getting hacked. The Committee to Protect Journalists, meanwhile, has expressed concern about the safety of media personnel reporting on the event on the ground. And many experts have warned that people who run afoul of the party’s sensibilities could be prevented from leaving China, as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo warned in an exclusive National Review interview last year.
Although NBC will keep its announcers in the U.S. due to China’s stringent Covid restrictions, it plans to have a few reporters in Beijing to cover the games. Wang said this means that the network has a particular responsibility to its audience during this time. “Given the restrictions regular journalists in China face, NBC should use this rare opportunity to cover issues beyond the sports arenas, shed light on the numerous human-rights issues that Chinese journalists don’t get to cover.”
But this latest partnership with an app that has worrisome ties to the Chinese party-state suggests that the network has little interest in doing what it can to mitigate the harm caused by this CCP propaganda coup.