The Post has taken a noticeably more neutral tone in its reporting on the threat posed by TikTok.
Washington Post opinion columnist Taylor Lorenz contends in her latest piece that the bipartisan group of lawmakers who devoted last week’s congressional hearing to the threat posed by the short-form video application TikTok understand neither the platform nor its audience. To judge by her assumptions about TikTok, Lorenz is just as confused about how the platform operates.
Lorenz manages some workmanlike generational critiques of the aging members of Congress who have mistakenly labeled viral displays of self-harm – sautéing chicken in NyQuil and asphyxiating yourself until you lose consciousness, for example – “TikTok challenges.” She correctly notes that these and other cloying acts of masochism can be found on many other social media platforms, too.
That is not, however, the primary objection lawmakers have to a platform used by an aggressive foreign power’s Communist government to collect data on Americans. When she seeks to neutralize the purported menace posed by the Chinese Communist Party’s control over this application, Lorenz perpetuates some of the misapprehensions about the platform she ostensibly set out to correct:
When [TikTok CEO Shou] Chew denied that TikTok censors videos related to the Uyghur genocide or the Tiananmen Square massacre, McMorris Rodgers warned him that, “Making false or misleading statements to Congress is a federal crime.” But a simple search on the app reveals dozens of videos bashing China and calling attention to the Uyghur genocide and the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It is simply sleight of hand to dismiss McMorris Rodgers’ contention here as the product of ignorance fueled by an oldster’s failure to understand that a “simple search” would satisfy any of TikTok’s honest critics. Indeed, given the reporter’s pedigree, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this summary dismissal of the congresswoman’s concerns was designed to mislead.
For years now, journalistic enterprises and governmental investigatory mechanisms around the globe have documented the ways in which TikTok and its Beijing-based owner ByteDance advance “Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.” The People’s Republic of China does impose its content preferences on this application, and it does limit the reach of information relating to sensitive topics the Chinese government regards with hostility.
The Washington Post itself has broken substantial ground in its reporting on TikTok’s malign influence. In 2019, the paper revealed how TikTok blocked users’ access to information regarding the ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong against Beijing’s effort to weaken the city’s political autonomy. Not only did the application censor information the PRC wanted censored, the content it allowed on its platform promulgated a false impression that the city was undisturbed by an unprecedented outpouring of anti-CCP sentiment.
That same year, the Post exposed the concerns of the service’s U.S.-based employees, who “were instructed to follow rules set by managers at ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters, such as demoting and removing content related to social and political topics, including those censored by the Chinese government.” Some of those efforts included a “ban” on “videos and topics” relating to Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, Tibet, and the PRC’s own “socialism system.” In 2022, a piece of reporting in the Post explored how ByteDance moved to the tune called by the CCP – as all China-based firms must. It doesn’t take a careful reading of this reporting to conclude that Lorenz’s observation regarding what U.S. users can access on this website if they search hard enough is beside the point.
Last year, a detailed report in Forbes noted the degree to which the Chinese government “built audiences and bought ads” across many U.S.-based social media platforms to “disseminate misinformation about topics such as the detainment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” none of which Chinese users see. In China, where almost all exogenous social media services are banned, the information environment is sanitized. By contrast, “TikTok accounts run by the propaganda arm of the Chinese government” pushed “divisive social issues” on American users and promoted “videos editorializing about U.S. politics.” Last year, BuzzFeed News alleged that “ByteDance actively inserted pro-China messages” that were algorithmically boosted so more Americans would encounter them.
If you search hard enough for an accurate accounting of Chinese abuses, maybe you’ll find them on TikTok in their “dozens.” But you’ll have to wade through a morass of propagandistic shlock to get there, and the preponderance of evidence suggests propagandistic shlock is one of the PRC’s deliberate foreign exports.
Of late, however, the Post has taken a noticeably more neutral tone in its reporting on the threat posed by TikTok. Last October, the paper’s senior video reporter and “TikTok team” lead “decided to actively try to get suppressed” on the platform and failed. That was a surprise considering that “TikTok has admitted to suppressing some of the words or phrases we used.” In February, the paper dismissed concerns over Chinese censorship by noting that its U.S. users were privy to “silly jokes and videos of the shootdown” of a Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S. airspace. In the last week, the paper criticized Congress for failing to note that even a Chinese dissident continues to use the platform to reach younger users. Sure, he was “temporarily suspended for ‘abusive behavior’ and had his account temporarily blocked” after posting Tiananmen-related content. Yet he still believes, according to the Post, that TikTok can be “a powerful tool for political advocacy and promoting the truth.”
The blasé tone in the Post’s recent coverage of the threat posed by this application is not evident in reporting on this subject elsewhere in the American press. It was not even apparent in the Post’s reporting on this subject just months ago. There seems to be little daylight between Lorenz’s opinions and the paper’s reporting on TikTok today. It’s unclear what changed, but according to the Democratic and Republican lawmakers who took up U.S. intelligence officials’ concerns about the app in last week’s hearing, it wasn’t TikTok.