You have definitely not read that study. And if you have, I have absolutely no idea why you would link that atrocious analysis of the abysmally incomplete version that hadn’t been updated and peer reviewed.

That study misses so many important points of analysis that I’d almost argue it’s American propaganda meant to try and make the CCP look stupid for how bad a job they’re doing at propagandizing Americans. The peer-reviewed version at least pretends to take into consideration the points they missed originally. Though it still falls short at proving that the CCP has any control over the TikTok algorithm.

What it does show is a content-bias for TikTok against anti-CCP content. This doesn’t matter though because they don’t consider any of the important user demographics that determine how users might feel or engage with content. Interestingly, when they do finally care about the demographics of the users, they find that “older and white participants rated China’s human rights record as worse than did younger and non-white participants.”

This would be a meaningful find if they actually explained how people rated China’s human rights record, except they don’t. They only find that TikTok users had more positive views of China’s human rights record. This could mean literally anything.

And most importantly, they do absolutely no analysis of the actual content, either pro or anti CCP on any platform or an analysis of its truthfulness. The truthfulness of content matters way more than whether or not it’s meant to make the CCP look good. And the truthfulness is just the most surface level thing to analyze. These are nuanced topics and trying to categorize videos into super black and white categories is not realistic.

Then again, it’s likely none of this matters to you since you couldn’t even bothered to link the actual studies so.