Congress made the right decision last month when it voted overwhelmingly to require TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app. But there’s more work to be done. 

TikTok is a Chinese Communist Party propaganda and espionage asset with tremendous ability to shape political discourse, and it intends to sabotage America’s democracy at every turn. Its latest effort, according to a trusted source inside the federal government, comes in the form of a plan for “protecting U.S. election integrity in 2024” by hiring “more than 40,000 trust and safety professionals” to remove “election misinformation that violates our policies.” 

That might sound good on the surface, but it raises serious questions about how TikTok defines election “misinformation.” What is considered election “misinformation” is in the eye of the beholder, and we seriously doubt TikTok’s judgment.

Will facts about China’s tyranny and military aggressiveness that are discussed by political candidates be considered “misinformation?” Will other election information considered harmful to liberals on everything from the security crisis at our border to the deep involvement of China in fentanyl smuggling into the United States be considered “misinformation?”

We already know the answers. A 2023 report by our Heritage Foundation colleague, Kara Frederick, notes that TikTok suppresses or boosts content in service of Beijing’s political agenda. Leaked documents, dating back to 2019, reveal that TikTok instructed its moderators to censor videos referencing Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or ostracized religious groups, such as the Falun Gong. 

During Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019, searches for #hongkong yielded a multiplicity of protest-related content on platforms such as Twitter (now X). But on TikTok, similar searches surfaced what one article characterized as “playful selfies, food photos and sing alongs.” This is by design.

TikTok can manually control what “goes viral” on its platform and can manipulate user feeds to favor political narratives that suit its values and interests. 

Weeks ago, for example, TikTok restricted the reach of a sitting member of the European Parliament, Maximilian Krah, because of his views about the need to restrict immigration in Europe, labeling them “conspiracy theories.” The app now prevents content posted by Krah from being shared in its users’ feeds. Meanwhile, the European Union’s elections are a month away. In another example of political manipulation, while the TikTok divestment bill was pending before Congress, the platform used in-app messages to mobilize thousands of its users to oppose the legislation. Members of Congress and their staff received an onslaught of angry calls, notes, and videos from tween users demanding that Congress table the bill. In some cases, users threatened violence against lawmakers who refused to oppose the legislation. 

Now TikTok says it will be working with Democracy Works to determine what is “reliable election information.” Democracy Works, as the Capital Research Center explains at Influence Watch, is a nonprofit organization whose major donors are almost all on the left side of the political aisle, such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, which George Soros funds to poison the country. Democracy Works is also a member of the Bridge Alliance, a network of “left-leaning” organizations that supports everything from restrictions on campaign speech to opposing commonsense reform measures such as voter IDs. 

TikTok also says it will be “fact-checking” the accuracy of content using “partners” such as Politifact. The bias and inaccuracy of supposed fact-checkers is well documented. As the Media Research Center’s analysis shows, fact-checkers almost always “slant left” in their analyses and seem to target conservatives, ignoring obvious misstatements and misinformation by liberals.

Congress took a crucial first step in forcing ByteDance to divest from TikTok, but the transition to a new owner likely won’t take place for at least nine months. Even then, it’s not clear that the new owners, whoever they are, will resist the temptation to wield the app’s awesome power for their own ends. 

Given TikTok’s disturbing history and its partnership with overtly partisan interest groups to police speech, further action is needed by Congress and state governments to curtail the platform’s political manipulation ahead of the 2024 election through in-depth investigations and potentially further regulation. 

In any event, Americans shouldn’t be using or consulting TikTok in the first place — certainly not for news or information on our election and political process. Anyone who does so is asking to be the victim of propaganda and actual misinformation. Worse still, they’re placing their internet usage and data at the mercy of an untrustworthy entity that is a front for those who have nothing but enmity for our country, our democracy, and our people. 

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Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission. Daniel Cochrane is a senior research associate in the Tech Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation.