In April 2020, an unnamed Chinese government entity attempted to queitly join TikTok in order to share propaganda with Western audiences.
According to internal TikTok messages seen by Bloomberg, the request to open a stealth account was shared with Elizabeth Kanter, TikTok’s head of government relations for the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, and Israel.
A message sent by a colleague to Kanter explained, "Chinese government entity that’s interested in joining TikTok but would not want to be openly seen as a government account as the main purpose is for promoting content that showcase the best side of China (some sort of propaganda)."
TikTok confirmed the request happened, with a spokesperson stating it was an "informal request from a friend of an employee," and that, "We declined to offer support for this request, as we believed the creation of such an account would violate our Community Guidelines."
The internal messages reveal the request was discussed by Kanter with Erich Andersen, Global Head of Corporate Affairs and General Counsel at TikTok. They deemed it a "sensitive" issue, but ultimately didn't allow the account to be created. Kanter and Andersen declined to comment when asked by Bloomberg, and the Chinese government did not respond to a request for comment.
Details of this request going public may be seen as a positive by TikTok's management because of how they pushed back against it. The short-form video hosting service has been facing a lot of criticism and scrutiny recently due to its links to China through parent company ByteDance. It doesn't help matters that it was recently discovered China repeatedly accessed US TikTok user data, which has resulted in calls for the FTC to investigate further.