US TikTok users who search for terms like Tiananmen, Tibet, and Uyghur

TikTok Inc. offices in Culver City, California, US. Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg

Videos condemning or negatively depicting China's human rights abuses are more difficult to find on TikTok than other rival networks, a new study finds, suggesting that US users may be getting an incomplete picture of the country's history when searching for key terms or phrases.

US TikTok users who search for terms like "Tiananmen," "Tibet," and "Uyghur" words commonly used in Chinese Communist Party propaganda  see less "anti-China" content than those same searches produce on Instagram and YouTube, according to a new study from the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University.

Analysts created 24 new accounts across ByteDance Ltd.-owned TikTok, Meta Platforms Inc.'s Instagram and Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube, to replicate the experience of American teenagers signing up for social media. When searching for keywords often related to the country's human rights abuses, TikTok's algorithm displayed a higher percentage of positive, neutral or irrelevant content than both Instagram and YouTube, the study found.

A TikTok spokesperson pushed back on the NCRI's findings, saying that creating new accounts and searching for these keywords does not reflect a real users' experience on the app. He also pointed out that TikTok is a newer service than rivals, and some of the incidents happened long before TikTok existed. — Alicia Clanton and Aisha Counts.