After Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, TikTok flooded users with videos expressing extreme positions from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tilted toward the Palestinian side, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. On Monday, the top U.S. intelligence official released a report saying that the Chinese government had used TikTok to promote its propaganda to Americans and to influence the 2022 midterm elections. TikTok is also owned by a company, ByteDance, that’s based in a country that is America’s biggest rival for global power: China. ByteDance executives say that they operate separately from China’s government and that they regularly remove misleading content from TikTok. The most likely scenario, experts say, is that officials aligned with the Chinese government shape TikTok’s algorithm to influence what content Americans see.

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Persons: Jeanna Smialek, Jim Tankersley, “, Sapna Maheshwari, China’s, Xi Jinping, Xi Organizations: Rutgers University, Rutgers, Communist Party, Soviet NBC Locations: U.S, Tibet, Hong Kong, United States, China, Soviet