The recent, if short-lived, ban on TikTok showed an alarming amount of support for the Chinese-controlled social media platform – and a complete disregard for any potential threat. When it seemed likely the platform would shut down in January last year, thousands went to RedNote (a Chinese alternative) and joked they were “Chinese spies” on a mission to troll the US government, making fun of the national security fears lawmakers had warned about. Even when it became clear that the platform was collecting and storing information, Gen Z didn’t seem to mind.
“It’s a post-Snowden and post-WikiLeaks generation that throws its hands up in the air and says, ‘we don’t care about the Chinese spy, everyone has our data,’” Elizabeth Ingleson, an international history professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science told Semafor.
Ingleson described it as Gen Z’s “nihilism,” which suggests “a very different sort of relationship between public opinion and policymakers,” where, the outlet explained, “government attempts to sow fear don’t resonate in the way they have historically.”
Security.org found that there are 170 million American monthly TikTok users. Of those, 50 million are under the age of 15. It’s not just collecting personal information that should make this so alarming, though. What about China’s influence on the platform’s users?
Bytedance, the company behind TikTok, is based in Beijing, bringing fears that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have some control. This, as the New York Post said, makes it a “perfect domestic propaganda tool: a direct line of communication with China’s youth to pump out pro-social and pro-China messages.” The Post added:
“Perhaps that’s why Chinese kids are shooting for the stars while American kids are shooting for virtual stardom. The most popular career ambition among American youth is an influencer. In China it’s an astronaut.”
“It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” former Google employee and Center for Humane Technology founder Tristan Harris told 60 Minutes in an episode called “TikTok in China versus the United States.”
Youth worldwide watch videos on the platform for an average of 91 minutes a day, “providing Bytedance with unprecedented access to the eyes, ears, hearts, and minds of young people,” The Post explained. “They’ve literally hooked our children.” ScienceDirect found that areas of the brain associated with addiction light up in brain scans when young people are shown videos on the social media app.
But in China, their kids and teens are restricted – not only in how long they can be on the device but in what they are allowed to watch. Young users are only allowed up to 40 minutes a day between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., The Post explained. They can’t endlessly scroll through content since it’s interrupted by five-second delays. Plus, kids are only shown specially selected “inspiring” content.
“The algorithm is vastly different, promoting science, educational and historical content in China while making our citizens watch stupid dance videos with the main goal of making us imbeciles,” Nicolas Chaillan, a former Air Force Chief Software Officer, told The Post. He added:
“TikTok is potentially the most powerful weapon of mass manipulation and misinformation ever created by the CCP. It’s a dream come true for them.”
This is perhaps why some experts have called the social media platform “a dagger pointed at the heart of the United States.” The concern is that the CCP could be influencing what Americans see on the app. Its “endless scroll function, for instance, means that as soon as kids open the app, they relinquish control over what they see on their screens,” the outlet reported.
In a YouTube clip titled “Scott Galloway – TikTok Is A Chinese PsyOp, Not Social Media,” Galloway thinks this is precisely what China is doing. “If I were a member of the CCP and I saw that we had a vested interest in diminishing America’s standing strategically in the world … I would just take my thumb and very elegantly and insidiously put it on the scale of content that reflects America in a bad light. I think that they’re doing this right now – they’d be stupid not to do it.”
Research from Google noted that 40% of Gen Z uses TikTok or Instagram as their primary search engines, which means their “entire internet could be under Chinese control,” The Post pointed out. Chaillan worried this influence could seriously affect our democratic process, telling the outlet, “TikTok is now one of the leading advertising platforms in the US and Europe, giving full control to the CCP to what content gets promoted and what sticks. That is probably enough to sway future elections.”
But that’s not all. Zing Coach conducted a survey that found 56% of Gen Z respondents use TikTok for health concerns, including diet and fitness, and 34% said they use it as their main health advice. While 66% said they trusted the videos if the authors were doctors, athletes, or nutritionists, one in three admitted they do not double-check the information. Three in five claimed to have seen misinformation regarding health or have come across harmful advice, while one in eleven reported having health issues after following the guidance seen from a TikTok video.
A Rasmussen Report from 2022 discovered that 49% of American adults believe TikTok has a negative influence on American culture, yet it is one of the most popular social media platforms available. So why do GenZers look the other way and continue to use the platform? Madeline Carr, a global politics and cybersecurity professor at University College London, told Semafor that attitudes toward China may be tied to more deep-rooted divisions in the US because TikTok lets young people “peek into cultures that they wouldn’t normally have access to.” Furthermore, “When combined with other grievances that polls have found, such as the feeling of being worse off than one’s parents, this exposure makes the story of American greatness in relation to the rest of the world more difficult to sustain.”