TikTok is not a vehicle for Chinese thought control
And what we can learn from it’s censorship policies
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If you’ve been following the news in the social media world recently, you’ve surely read something about TikTok and it’s censorship of subjects that are considered sensitive to the Chinese government. To many, this seems like and has been reported as, the Chinese government imposing its authoritarianism on the outside world. Well here’s my take — it’s not.
Let’s start by assuming that is, in fact, what they are attempting. Should we then also expect that the executives of Bytedance — the company that owns Tiktok — are not aware of the fact that people outside of China use other social media platforms other than Tiktok? Of course not. So for them to attempt some sort of though-control by censoring content on their platform — only one of many which are not censored — logically, makes no sense at all.
Let’s consider this from a more reasonable perspective. In China, all tech companies are held responsible, by law, for all content that gets posted to their platforms. This is very different from what we are used to in the US, where what users post and share on platforms do not represent the views of the platform itself. With that in mind, it's easy to understand that Chinese tech companies have a completely different mindset when it comes to creating social platforms. They’ve have gotten incredibly good at not getting political while also creating extremely addictive user experiences. So why not export something they know works? Put another way: why allow divisive, outrage-provoking political content on a platform whose sole purpose from the beginning was simply to entertain?
We’ve gotten so used to our platforms evolving into massive beasts of political and social influence that we see something wrong if one does not.
Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent have experienced significant consumer backlash recently by doing exactly the opposite of what Tiktok is being criticized for. That is, a lack of content restrictions has led to mass political manipulation; Cambridge Analytica, Russian troll farms, and unprecedented disinformation campaigns have influenced our democratic system and others’ to devastating effects.
That’s because when you put political driven content on a platform whose business model relies on maximizing user engagement — which Tiktok very much does — that content which is most sensationalized and polarized gets spread further and faster than anything else. That is to say, content is not read or watched widely in proportion to its informational value, but instead, how much it appeals to our emotions.
So, if Tiktok were to become a politicized platform, we could expect it to become yet another morass of fake news and extreme polarization. Is that really what we want?
