חוקרים: טיקטוק מקדמת תכנים לטובת זוהרן ממדאני

Turning now to the upcoming New York City mayoral election and AI company's latest findings show the Chinese-owned TikTok seems to be promoting content related to one of the candidates, the far-left New York politician Zohra Mamdani. So how did they find out about it? The company analyzed millions of TikTok videos through a program built upon TikTok's leaked documents. NTD's Flora Hua has more. The leaked documents exist on GitHub, where engineers share open-source codes and programs. And these codes are part of TikTok's training materials for newly hired software engineers. The tech firm Spring AI built a computer model with these codes and wanted to test out how TikTok decides on which content to promote from the way people engage with it. The AI researchers had tested millions of videos with this model, and they noticed some content was getting unexplained promotion. One type stood out, the videos supporting Mamdani, which many described as socialist or even communist due to his extreme political views. Meanwhile, the researchers found videos backing the moderate Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo were being quietly pushed to the sidelines. TikTok rejected the accusation, calling the study not based on any form of reality. This is not the first time the short video platform has faced criticism of political bias. Israeli officials have accused TikTok of routinely taking down their content. Two years ago, several conservative TikTok content creators also experienced a similar situation. They said the platform had deleted much of their content or forced them to switch to new accounts. Last year, in congressional hearings, TikTok was accused of pushing Beijing's narratives on U.S. soil, including the cover-up of human rights abuses in Xinjiang or Tibet. CCP officials are also taking executive roles in TikTok's parent company, ByteDance. Now, the Trump administration is pushing China to divest TikTok to American companies. But Beijing has already classified TikTok's algorithm as its controlled export technology, which Americans cannot own but only use it with China's license. This raises concerns of how the app could shape Americans' way of thinking, especially their political views. Flora Hua, NTD News.