Lesson in media literacy #1

TikTok is Chinese? No way!

Hey, welcome to this first lesson in media literacy!

This is a series that I’ve been wanting to start for a long time. I think now more than ever, it’s important to have media literacy so each one of us can be more informed about what we read and what we are exposed to, and make the right decisions.

It doesn’t matter if you like or dislike a certain media outlet — it’s still important to be able to read their information critically and make your own opinion. Knowing more about the information we are exposed to, why it’s exposed to us, what it wants us to think or why it even exists in the first place is all part of critical thinking, a skill that we need more than even in this world of 24/7 connectivity and AI fakes.

For this first lesson, I was so taken aback by a 2 minutes and 40 seconds video produced by CNN that I finally sat down and wrote this first lesson. We’ll be looking over this video step-by-step, but let’s start from the basics first.

The news are written by humans, with all their faults, sensibilities and agendas. Sometimes, we might not even realize we are imbuing our words with our own views. We do this sometimes willfully, consciously, and sometimes subconsciously.

An example: someone might describe a concert they went to as the “best time of their life”, whereas someone else who went to the same concert might describe it as “Good but not great”. Both have the same root of an emotion: overall, they liked the concert. But the words they chose to convey that emotion are different and imply different outcomes. Yet, neither of those two had the time to think carefully about their words, instead just saying what came to their mind.

In communication, students learn that there is verbal communication, which is what you vocalize, and nonverbal communication, which is usually reduced to body language: if you look anxious versus confident, if you look happy versus sad, etc.

Nonverbal communication, however, actually encompasses anything that is not a vocalization.

Whatever you don’t say is just as much communication as what you do say. It’s communication through obfuscation: you know something to be true, but you are not mentioning it. And what do you decide to mention, of course, also communicates something — in the barest way possible.

As humans, we are very good at thinking abstractly, beyond what exists tangibly in front of our eyes. We are able to make up stories that exist only in our words; we are able to understand concepts such as government (tangibly a collection of people that do specific things) and how this is different from a rock band (still a collection of people that do specific things).

It’s in this context that I want to analyze this short video from CNN, from March of last year. Go ahead and watch it first if you feel like it.

When we analyze this video, please remember all of the above about nonverbal communication and our capacity for abstract thought.

Beyond what the narrator in the video chooses to say (or not to say), choices have to be made: in what order do we present the information? What do we illustrate it with? Is there content we can cut out of the video? How long do we even want the video to be?

This is the abstract part: beyond what is said and can be heard, someone can design all of the above and more around those words. And someone — or more likely several people — did do all this work around that one short video. I can assure you this 2 minutes and 39 seconds video took several days of man-hours to make.

It seems every time I get reminded of CNN’s existence, I have to wonder how they still exist when they use clearly loaded languages and build narratives out of thin air, and how this somehow still qualifies as news. To their credit, they do it very well.

It’s almost incredible how much non-news, loaded language and agenda they managed to fit in this short video. Certainly, I can see why CNN is as big as it is.

Let’s get into it and analyze this entire video: its words and its narrative.

TikTok is Chinese?

Hooking segment

The video opens with dire news: “TikTok is under pressure of being banned all for being owned by a Chinese company”.

CNN even got what I’ve come to call the token Asian host for this video: any random Asian-looking correspondent they have, even if they are not from China, they get to run these Sinophobic stories just to distance the outlet from accusations of racism or targeted harassment. The choice of the headliner subtly implies “we can’t be racist, even our Chinese correspondent thinks the same!”

This sounds serious. But there is no mention of why TikTok is coming under fire “once again”. This is the hook: the first few seconds of the video are meant to get you to watch the next few seconds. And the next few seconds will get you to watch the next few, again and again until the end of the video. By not telling you exactly what’s happening to TikTok, CNN hopes you will watch more of the video where they will get to nudge you towards exactly what they want you to.

And here, CNN did something very clever already: the way they present this ban, which they fully support by the way (1. for being Chinese and 2. for being competition), comes across as almost pleading a case for TikTok. The very little information they give in the opening seconds of the video scream “look at the poor app being bullied for being Chinese! What is this racism!”

Bait and switch segment

But then, something very interesting happens. Right after those words of defense are uttered, the host completely pivots on her language — but not on her tone at all, to try and confuse viewers into nodding along with her.

“In China, TikTok is banned”. Those are her very next words. Before we get into verifying that claim, I want to take a moment to congratulate CNN on this seamless bait-and-switch.

TikTok is not banned in China. It’s just that due to local laws, it was easier for ByteDance to make an app for their market, and another one for the international market. It’s nothing special or sinister as the host seems to imply — that because TikTok is banned in its “home” country, maybe the Chinese know something about it that we don’t — and yes, you might recognize some Yellow Peril propaganda in those words, about the Chinese being untrustworthy, mystical, or double-dealers.

The host even says right after her long diatribe about Douyin and TikTok that Douyin was the first app to come out. She even agrees that Douyin was a “viral sensation in China before launching overseas”.

You will not get to dwell on this point too long, however. This short segment, the bait-and-switch ends and a new one begins.

The luring segment

Here, the host, from her nice hotel room in Beijing, proceeds to show us an experiment that has nothing to do with the video. She does it with the tone one would explain something to a toddler too, to really drive home what CNN thinks of its viewers.

This section is the lure (I might as well keep going with the fishing analogies!). It’s shiny, it’s eye-catching, but ultimately it does nothing — in fishing, the bait is what gets fish to bite. The lure is just there to get their attention until their untimely demise.

This segment could have been entirely removed from the video, but it exists for one specific reason: to get you to bite on the bait, which is the entire Sinophobic narrative CNN has been building up since 2019.

The content of this section involves the very serious narrator pulling up two phones, one with Douyin and one with TikTok. She further drives home the point that she can only access TikTok

The video doesn’t mention this mind you, leaving you to fill in the blanks (that they carefully outlined for you to fall into), but why did they not ask Chinese people if they really cared about accessing TikTok? CNN says themselves that Douyin has 600 million daily users, all of whom speak Chinese, which is a far bigger accessible community than any other in the world. Why would they want to go on TikTok, when they have all their friends and content on Douyin, which came first?

Here, they lie without lying. The point CNN is trying to hammer into our heads is that a) TikTok is banned in China (which is not true, and for which they should issue a retraction if they have any integrity); b) Chinese people want to access Tiktok, and c) they can’t because it’s banned, therefore the Chinese government is infringing on peoples’ freedoms.

In this same segment — before the host actually begins the experiment — she feels it necessary to disparage Douyin in the same way highschool girls in early 2000s movies bully each other. Douyin is different, it has different features and kids can only access it for 40 minutes a day (a strange word to use considering I’ve never met anyone who thinks letting children watch Youtube all day long is healthy for them). And OMG - it automatically puts a beauty filter that I can turn off on my camera! Which is somehow bad for some reason and deserves to be mentioned and demonstrated in a 2 minute video?

The camera cuts to a different scene, again not giving you the time to think about all the words you’ve just been exposed to, instead forcing you to absorb them and move on with the pace CNN picked for you. There, the host goes on an entirely different tangent, and, of course, brings up the Beijing protests (specifically the ones in Tiananmen). This has been the go-to search for all third-rate “journalists” since 1989. She even calls the events a “massacre”, which was conclusively shown not to be one.

This is where relying on the token Asian host gets very treacherous. She has to do the song and dance for her US employers, and she cannot come out of it winning no matter what she does.

Going along with the narrative of China being a totalitarian hellhole where social media is banned and the wrong keywords don’t get you any results (The Tiananmen clearing was discussed in report 590 on this official government page) end up demonizing all Chinese people, and even non-Chinese Asians — we’ve all seen the surge in hate crimes directed against Asians in North America. And the narrator is directly contributing to that sentiment through this piece. She is directly contributing to her own oppression even as she might think, like many before her, that she will be considered “one of the good ones”.

And on the other hand, she is not winning any points with China and its people — if that is indeed where she is from, mind you — and is essentially selling them out for money.

She is not making friends anywhere with this piece, which exists only to demonize China further through something popular, an app that millions use.

I myself am not from the US, but I know CNN is kind of a joke there. Still, they claim to be a news outlet and operate as one, and I don’t think it’s really any better than any other mainstream media company. I think that CNN is just more blatant about their bias, but I have to ask: do people still take CNN seriously?

Dangling the bait

You’ve been lured by the shine of the evil Chinese government, sorry — Douyin — not having any videos if you use the wrong keywords, and now the bait is in sight: the tasty morsel that hides the hook behind it.

The next segment of the video doesn’t even pretend to be on your side, or China’s side, anymore. It doesn’t pretend to be fair and balanced.

Because if you’ve watched this far, you’re ready to get your thoughts validated by an authoritative figure — the huge CNN conglomerate — and they could tell you anything they at this point without any pretenses.

The narrator spends most of the time allotted to this segment presenting what Washington (the US government) claims is the reason behind the ban of TikTok uncritically. The only criticism they raise up is that “security experts say the concerns are hypothetical at best”, without developing on that point further.

The irony, CNN says, is that China has “blocked” foreign websites and apps, including Google, Youtube, Netflix, Whatsapp and more. Again, they do not develop on that point further.

These apps are blocked because their parent companies didn’t want to obey Chinese laws. TikTok, on the other hand, obeys US laws. It is not China’s fault if other governments refuse to legislate social media usage and policies. Nowhere in US law does it say, for example, what personal or private data is or that it has to remain in the US (a huge point of contention between Chinese law and Facebook and Google).

Yet these companies have no problem obeying EU law which states that data acquired in Europe cannot leave the EU. Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc. all have European headquarters in Ireland and obey these laws without problem.

If you want to do business in China, you have to obey Chinese law. And China, despite what CNN implies, will tell you the same: if you want to do business in the US, you have to obey US law. It’s not their fault if, when the US refuses to legislate against their tech giants, other companies start using this loose legislation as well.

Reeling the catch in

By this point in the video, CNN hopes that you’ll have been lured, baited, hooked, and are now ready to reel in. The last 40 seconds of this short 160 seconds video is dedicated to showing reactions from both US and Chinese TikTokers/Douyiners about what they think of this possible ban. The Douyin creators are even called “nationalistic”, whatever that means (CNN, as a fake news company, does not define the words it uses, but rather places them to evoke emotions).

The videos they choose to broadcast to illustrate this segment are not random. An algorithm did not pick them, someone had to go through them one by one and choose which videos they would show in this segment. Again, the whole video from CNN was designed by more than one person to convey a certain narrative.

As such, the very first video CNN shows is someone yelling into their microphone about the ban. They make very valid points (that US laws is what allows TikTok to operate as it does and banning it would only fix the symptoms, not the cause), but because they look agitated when they make their points, CNN wants you to believe this person is being unreasonable and throwing a tantrum.

The second video they show is an elderly man calmly explaining a message to President Joe Biden directly. But you might have noticed that CNN, who is fully behind Biden and endorses him completely, never once talked about Biden directly in their piece. They talked about Washington and about Congress, but never once named Biden. The link they want to imply here is that blaming Biden is for people who don’t understand what they’re mad about, and that this elderly is only concerned about having his treats and is not being reasonable either.

They want you to believe the only reasonable option is to ban TikTok, and all the arguments, all the experiments, all the demonstrations, all the off-topic segments (like the search on Tiananmen) only ever served to drive that conclusion into your head, but in a way that makes you feel like you came up with it.

CNN did show some Douyin creators in the end of their segment, but here’s where it gets outright farcical: remember how the host made a big show of how Douyin automatically applies a beauty filter? (That she can turn off, but didn’t mention)

This is where it comes back, like Chekhov’s gun. When we are shown these good-looking Douyin creators, we are supposed to think they’re “fake” in some way; including in the fact that this is not really their face because Douyin has a beauty filter. The implications are clear: “nationalistic” Chinese, which is what the narrator called these creators, represent a tiny fraction of loyalists; they are not the average Chinese person, they are controlled opposition, they are fake people designed to spread out propaganda — a word that they also used in the video, but only towards China.

Propaganda is insidious in that it doesn’t always tell you what to think outright. When a proper climate has been created, it can simply insinuate things and you will pick up on them yourself.

Have you bitten the bait?

This is the decisive moment. Until the fish bites the bait, it still has a chance to swim away. Only you can decide whether you bite down on the bait, or walk away from it.

I hope you liked this article. I want to do more content on the mainstream media specifically, because every time I open an article (a few times a year), I get more and more appalled at how low it seems to be sinking. I realize however the written format might not be the most efficient for this, as it’s a lot of information to go through even just to analyze a 2 minutes 40 video.

Anyway, if you liked reading through this piece, please don’t hesitate to click like and restack! It really helps a lot to help other people find this article too!