Since its U.S. launch in 2018, people have worried that the Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok is vacuuming up data on America’s teenagers and transforming them into modern, digital versions of the throngs who once enthusiastically waved Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.
Now, an updated study conducted by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)—provided exclusively to The Free Press—finds that those fears may be justified.
The new research is being released as the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments this week about whether the U.S. site must be sold or shut down. TikTok, owned by the Chinese media giant ByteDance, is arguing that federal legislation forcing a sale by January 19 is an unconstitutional limit on free speech. (A lawyer for Donald Trump has asked the Court to delay the sale date so the president-elect can pursue “a political resolution.”)