A Democratic Counter to Chinese Censorship
An Initiative by
Paul Scharre
Vice President and Director of Studies, Center for a New American Security
Kara Frederick
Technology Policy Fellow, The Heritage Foundation
China’s rise as a global technology leader poses a profound challenge to democratic nations in the Indo-Pacific and around the world. Under the umbrella of Beijing’s protectionism, Chinese tech giants such as Tencent and ByteDance have grown some of the largest social media platforms in the world, such as WeChat, QQ and Qzone.
With TikTok (owned by ByteDance), Chinese social media platforms are going global. As their reach expands beyond China’s borders, they risk Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship. Beijing is exporting more than technology; it is exporting its censorship of ‘sensitive topics’ that offend CCP leaders, and in the process threatening the democratic principle of free expression. Democracies in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world must work together to ensure the continued health of an information ecosystem that is consistent with free expression.
In the 1990s, after the fall of communism in Europe, the United States adopted a policy of active engagement with China in the belief that ‘growing interdependence would have a liberalising effect’ on Beijing, according to then US president Bill Clinton. Yet for the CCP, engagement is highly conditional. Western information or social networking services such as Google and Facebook that refused to accede to the CCP’s censorship demands have been blocked in China. In their absence, a wholly indigenous crop of Chinese social media companies arose. Yet most of these Chinese companies have struggled to gain widespread traction outside China, with the exception of some Chinese diasporas in places such as Australia. WeChat, for example, has a mere 2.3 million users in the United States.
TikTok was the first Chinese-owned social media platform to go global. Exploding onto the world stage in 2018, TikTok built solid user bases in India, the United States, Indonesia, Russia, Japan and Europe. By mid-2020, TikTok had 700 million users globally. (ByteDance operates a separate app, Douyin, inside China that has 600 million users.) TikTok’s Chinese ownership has raised concerns in the United States about US citizens’ private data being exfiltrated to China. Yet far more dangerous is the export of China’s model of censorship.
TikTok’s content, which consists largely of quirky, funny videos, would seem to belie concerns over the politicisation of the platform, but the insidious nature of censorship means that users can’t see the material that is blocked because it was deemed objectionable.
There are numerous instances of TikTok censoring political content. On multiple occasions, the company has issued apologies for political content that was censored due to a ‘technical glitch’ or a ‘human moderation error’. Leaked company documents detail guidelines to prohibit videos of ‘highly controversial topics, such as … inciting the independence of … Tibet and Taiwan’, ‘demonisation or distortion of local or other countries’ history such as … Tiananmen Square incidents’ and ‘criticism/attack towards policies, social rules of any country, such as … separation of powers, socialism system, etc’. ByteDance has acknowledged the documents, yet claimed ‘the old guidelines in question are outdated and no longer in use’. TikTok’s data security risks – which are very real – are overshadowed by the far larger risk of exporting CCP censorship to democratic countries.
TikTok self-censoring to please Beijing is merely the latest example in a long history of Beijing extending its censorship abroad. While China is not the only country driving self-censorship by private digital platforms, the scale, volume and reach of Beijing’s attempts to control these companies’ decision-making is well documented. CCP leaders have consistently sought to strongarm non-Chinese companies and organisations, including Hollywood, international airlines, the NBA and the World Health Organization, to comply with CCP demands on ‘sensitive topics’ such as Xinjiang, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Social media platforms, however, pose a special kind of risk.
The winner-take-all market dynamics of social media platforms mean that often only one company will dominate a niche in the social media ecosystem. If TikTok, or any other Chinese-owned social media platform, were to gain a dominant position globally, it may be very difficult for a competitor to unseat them.
Additionally, censorship by a social media company has far graver consequences than self-censorship by a multinational corporation such as an airline. Social media platforms are a marketplace of ideas. A social media company censoring political content doesn’t just mean the company itself refrains from making statements that might anger Beijing, such as supporting Hong Kong protesters. Rather, the company censors any user on the platform from making statements that offend Beijing. This influences the wider information ecosystem by cutting off engagement between individual users and professional journalism on these platforms. The harm is not merely symbolic and limited, but widespread and pernicious.
Democratic nations have begun to take steps to protect their information ecosystem from encroachment by Chinese-owned companies that are subject to the CCP’s demands. In 2020, India began issuing a series of bans against Chinese apps, eventually banning TikTok and 266 other apps. In the United States, US presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden both issued executive orders affecting TikTok, although the company has fought back in court.
Democratic nations in the Indo-Pacific and around the world must work together to ensure that the information ecosystem is dominated by social media platforms that respect democratic values, such as free expression and individual privacy. This means greater transparency about company ownership and content moderation policies. Democracies must also work together to articulate and adopt risk-based frameworks to assess the threats posed by platforms such as TikTok. Democratic governments and the private sector must collaborate to build products that enshrine democratic values, such as individual privacy, in product design to create commercially viable alternatives to CCP-beholden platforms. They should exchange policy ideas to counter the risks from such companies, as well as from other companies subject to authoritarian governments. Many countries are already pushing back against Chinese-owned social media platforms, but democracies will be stronger if they work together in this. The future of free expression hangs in the balance.