TikTok disables hashtag view counts after Gaza war controversy

TikTok spokesman Alex Haurek mentioned the change was made final month, including that the corporate is “regularly evolving the TikTok platform and displaying hashtag metrics by variety of posts brings us according to trade requirements.” He famous that tutorial researchers produce other methods to review TikTok content material.

Firm officers have mentioned the Israel-related viewership numbers had been utilized in deceptive methods. However additionally they used the info themselves to argue that the corporate’s suggestion algorithm doesn’t “take sides” and that different platforms present a similar viewership gap.

Israel-Gaza war sparks debate over TikTok’s role in setting public opinion

The Middle for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group that first noted the change Wednesday, known as it “a step again for transparency” that “makes it tougher to know the size of potential harms.”

The group had used the characteristic through the years to review the unfold of movies selling antisemitism, consuming issues and different dangerous content material. In a report final yr, the group mentioned TikTok movies selling steroids and comparable medicine had been seen greater than 589 million instances.

The change is more likely to gas additional criticism over the corporate’s degree of transparency into how one in every of the world’s most popular apps runs. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing final week, TikTok’s chief government Shou Zi Chew was grilled over whether or not its possession by the Chinese language tech big ByteDance had affected the content material it shared with world audiences. Chew has mentioned repeatedly that the corporate is just not influenced by the Chinese language authorities.

Acknowledgment of the change comes one month after TikTok restricted one other instrument, Inventive Middle, that researchers had used to look at video-viewership variations through the Gaza battle. That instrument now not offers info on hashtags associated to the battle or different political points.

The info had been utilized by critics to argue that TikTok had chosen to supply a lopsided view of the battle to advance Chinese language coverage targets, which the corporate vigorously disputes. Haurek mentioned the instrument was constructed for advertisers and had been misused to “draw inaccurate conclusions,” including that the change would “guarantee it’s used for its meant objective.”

TikTok’s hashtag information is an imperfect measure for assessing consumer habits: Many movies aren’t given a hashtag, and a few creators add them to movies merely to criticize what they depict. The overall view rely for a hashtag, the knowledge TikTok now hides, is equally imprecise, as a result of it gives no indication of whether or not a video has been closely promoted by TikTok’s algorithm or is well-liked for causes of its personal.

However these information factors supplied a few of the solely clues that social media researchers can use to guage TikTok’s algorithm, which promotes content material in an opaque approach to a consumer base that now consists of 170 million accounts throughout the USA. Researchers have for years pushed TikTok and different platforms to share extra information on what sorts of content material is promoted or suppressed.

TikTok has labored to handle these considerations by opening a “transparency center” in Los Angeles the place journalists and policymakers have been given excursions to see how the platform works. One other heart is scheduled to open quickly in Washington.

The corporate additionally shares some public information associated to video efficiency and search outcomes through a system known as Research API. Entry to the system, nonetheless, is proscribed to U.S.-based tutorial researchers who should apply and be chosen by TikTok.

TikTok’s rivals have adopted comparable measures to undercut unbiased analysis.

X, previously Twitter, this yr told teachers they wanted to delete the info they’d collected from a free, years-old partnership granting them entry to an enormous stream of tweets often known as the “firehose.” In 2020, Fb cut off a New York College analysis group that tracked political-ad focusing on on the platform, saying it compromised individuals’s privateness. And in 2022, Meta, which owns Fb, shut down a instrument known as CrowdTangle that journalists and researchers had used to indicate which posts had been hottest — usually with embarrassing, odd or politically skewed outcomes — after executives said the instrument was unrepresentative of regular use.

Joel Finkelstein, a researcher on the Community Contagion Analysis Institute at Rutgers College, mentioned TikTok’s hashtag-view change steered the corporate was equally desirous to defang researchers who needed to uncover the platform’s issues.

Finkelstein used the hashtag information in a December report to argue that video subjects deemed subversive by Chinese language censors, such because the Hong Kong protests, had been comparatively underdiscussed on TikTok in contrast with different platforms. (Requested about that examine final week, Chew cited a report by a libertarian assume tank, the Cato Institute, that mentioned its methodology was flawed.)

The hashtag-view change is “half and parcel of what seems to be a set technique for eliminating transparency” inside the corporate, Finkelstein mentioned. “The extra issues there are, the tighter the curtain will get closed.”