News

Forgotten Fact Checks

Democracy Dies in Spin: Washington Post Reporters Double as PR Flacks for TikTok

By
The Washington Post Company building in Washington, D.C. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we round up the Washington Post’s propaganda-filled reporting on TikTok, take on a New York Times hit piece on the fight over gender ideology, and cover more media misses.

Washington Post Goes to Bat for TikTok

Many elected Republicans and Democrats agree: TikTok is a danger to Americans and should be banned, or at the very least heavily regulated.

Among the laundry list of concerns surrounding the massively popular short-form-video app: ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based owner, has allegedly spied on American citizens, including several tech journalists; the app has the ability to boost or censor videos in response to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party; the platform’s trends and filters threaten the mental health and safety of American children; and, of course, TikTok has a huge collection of user information, including biometric location data for more than 100 million users in America alone.

Because TikTok’s parent company is based in China, lawmakers have expressed concern that it would be required to comply with Chinese laws requiring companies to provide the CCP with access to user data and other proprietary information.

But over at the Washington Post, no one seems too concerned. In fact, the paper’s recent coverage of the issue has veered into pure PR.

“If the goal is to plug the holes in the U.S. information sphere, banning TikTok and other foreign apps might be like a Band-Aid on a colander,” WaPo’s technology news analysis writer Will Oremus wrote in an “analysis” piece published on Monday.

The article cites the recent leak of classified military documents by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old intelligence operative with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, as evidence that “China doesn’t need TikTok to find U.S. secrets.” Teixeira was arrested for the leak, which included top secret information about the war in Ukraine, among other things.

While lawmakers were holding a hearing on TikTok last month where they “crowded into a packed Capitol hearing room to harangue” TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, “What members of Congress didn’t know was that state secrets had been trickling out for months on social media and were beginning to circulate in ever-wider online forums — not on TikTok, but on U.S.-owned Discord,” Oremus writes.

“In the two weeks after the TikTok hearing, those classified documents would make their way into public view on U.S.-owned Twitter — and remain there for days, as owner Elon Musk mocked the idea that he ought to remove them.”

Oremus underscores that the leaks “didn’t stem from any foreign adversary’s sinister plot” but instead from a “21-year-old U.S. National Guard member’s desire to impress his online pals.” He says the leak is part of a “colorful 21st-century tradition of secrets spilled online, from WikiLeaks’ earliest uploads to Russian operatives’ hack of the Democratic National Committee.”

Why ban TikTok when it’s not the only way American data and information can be compromised, the writer seems to suggest.

The write-up is largely a continuation of a similar argument Oremus made last month around the hearing: “America’s online privacy problems are much bigger than TikTok.”

That report quotes TikTok CEO as saying, “I don’t think ownership is the issue here. With a lot of respect: American social companies don’t have a great record with privacy and data security. I mean, look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.”

Oremus adds: “He’s not wrong. At a hearing in which TikTok was often portrayed as a singular, untenable threat to Americans’ online privacy, it would have been easy to forget that the country’s online privacy problems run far deeper than any single app. And the people most responsible for failing to safeguard Americans’ data, arguably, are American lawmakers.”

And another Washington Post piece excerpted from the paper’s newsletter The Tech Friend suggests lawmakers must make a better argument than, “Trust us, TikTok is bad.” The article quotes former Biden White House adviser on tech and competition policy Tim Wu. “If you’re going to take something from the American public, we need to tell them why,” Wu said.

The piece claims that, “U.S. officials have been warning about TikTok for four years without providing specific evidence of harm.” This is despite a mountain of reporting on the app’s threats.

In another report, the paper trots out Chinese dissident Kim Wong’s success on TikTok as evidence the app can’t be so bad. Wong “has attracted a giant online audience with his Mandarin-language videos criticizing the Chinese government”:

Wong says he understands and supports the calls to ban TikTok in the United States because of its potential for misuse by the Chinese state. But he also calls TikTok a uniquely powerful tool for reaching young Mandarin-speaking people around the world. Blocking it would close off an influential route for questioning the Chinese government’s authoritarianism — and mean one fewer voice breaking through.

Yet China has its own version of TikTok called Douyin, which is also owned by ByteDance and has “detailed rules banning criticism and ‘subversion’ of the PRC and its Communist Party.” The Chinese app’s community self-disciplinary regulations say Douyin “adheres to and promotes” the “traditional culture and virtues of the Chinese nation” and “the core values of socialism.” The guidelines ban content that “damages the national image or interests” of the PRC,  “subverts state power,” or encourages people to protest. Other banned content includes any postings damaging the image of the PRC or any “revolutionary leaders, heroes, and martyrs” or advocating independence for Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang.

So, what U.S. users of TikTok see is entirely different from what Chinese users of Douyin are permitted to see. Even so, leaked documents in 2019 indicated TikTok’s site-moderation guidelines instructed moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or Falun Gong. At the time, the Washington Post reported that amid widespread pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, a search for Hong Kong returned “barely a hint of unrest in sight.”

Now, the paper has changed its tune on TikTok’s censorship. A recent article seems to argue that TikTok can’t possibly be censoring or otherwise wielding influence over what content can be shown and boosted since videos about the Chinese spy balloon were allowed to go viral on the platform.

One such video “capturing one of China’s most embarrassing geopolitical blunders wasn’t suppressed,” and was viewed more than 2.3 million times in two days, despite the user who posted the video having just 3,000 followers:

TikTok’s opaque recommendation algorithm, like those of its American social media competitors, makes it hard for outsiders to know exactly which videos are being surfaced or ignored. And TikTok’s critics have said that should fuel suspicion that ByteDance — TikTok’s parent company, founded in Beijing — could work to sink videos critical of China and elevate ones extolling the ruling Communist Party’s ideals.

But the spy balloon suggests a more nuanced situation: that of a colorful, chaotic social network containing many views of the same events, hewing to no clear political dogma and reflecting the creativity and sensibilities of a vast and raucous user base.

It should go without saying that the identification of a few popular videos that cut against the CCP’s interest does not negate the many documented examples of censorship and manipulation that benefit the dictatorial regime.

The Post has also taken up the argument advanced by some of the more nakedly self-interested Democrats in Congress, arguing that the fight over TikTok is a “generational” one because “social media and TikTok in particular provide a means to speak truth to power directly, immediately and loudly.”

Older Americans — like lawmakers — simply can’t understand that because it is not something that was available to them when they were young, columnist Philip Bump argues.

“After all, it’s still the case that older Americans hold disproportionate political and economic power, if not cultural power,” Bump adds. “That colors the current debate over potentially banning TikTok dramatically. It’s not only a fight over what TikTok does and a gulf in the perceived threat posed by the platform. It’s also a reflection of the fact that political power is wielded by a group that generally doesn’t use the platform.”

Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell made a similar comment about lawmakers seeking to ban the app despite likely having never used it themselves:

Meanwhile, Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post’s lead purveyor of misinformation, could not miss out on a chance to join the fray: “Congress had a lot to say about TikTok. Much of it was wrong.” Her “fact-checks” centered on viral challenges that members of Congress attributed to TikTok, despite the trends having predated the app’s existence. The article, which also quotes a “disinformation researcher” from the Accelerationism Research Consortium, “a nonprofit studying the threat of far-right extremism to democratic societies,” goes on to suggest that the existence of “dozens of videos bashing China and calling attention to the Uyghur genocide and the Tiananmen Square massacre” refutes concerns from lawmakers about TikTok’s documented censorship.

So what gives? The Washington Post previously published combative scoops about the dangers of the app before this most recent explosion of propaganda.

The Washington Examiner noted last month that the Washington Post “can’t stop shilling for TikTok.” It suggests the paper is carrying water for the app because it has 1 million followers on its own TikTok account and even has a designated “TikTok team.” The Washington Post has also allowed the app to advertise within its pages:

The TikTok ads come after the Washington Post previously came under fire for accepting more than $4.6 million from China Daily, an English-language newspaper controlled by the CCP, between 2016 and 2020. As of May 2021, the Washington Post — and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal — had severed ties with China Daily, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Headline Fail of the Week

This week, the New York Times offered a hard-hitting look into “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives.”

“Defeated on same-sex marriage, the religious right went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors,” a subheading on the story reads. “The campaign that followed has stunned political leaders across the spectrum.”

NR’s Charles C. W. Cooke succinctly points out the absurdity of the piece’s claims:

Media Misses

  • Gun control activist David Hogg had a distasteful response to Republican Senator Rick Scott’s announcement that his friend was killed in the Louisville bank shooting last week:
  • Jen Psaki, less than one year removed from her role as a Biden administration mouthpiece, now considers herself a journalist:
  • The Daily Beast wrote a profile of the Louisville bank shooter that came pretty close to doing PR for a killer:
Exit mobile version