I'm not disinclined to believe that TikTok promotes pro-China sentiment, but this report is far from academically rigorous and has gaping holes in its methodology that would not pass peer review.

* Most notable is that the baseline for determining whether a hashtag has been boosted or deboosted on TikTok comes from Instagram---hardly an unbiased source of ground truth, especially in light of the recent allegations that Meta deboosts pro-Palestinian content and other controversial political content.

* Worse is that there's no statistical analysis showing that generic political hashtags are significantly different from China-sensitive political hashtags between TikTok and Instagram. There is large variance within categories, and even some of the generic political hashtags show a bigger difference between platforms than the China-sensitive political hashtags. Statistics would help determine whether a real difference exists beyond sampling error, but none are to be found in this report.

* No explanation of how the hashtags were determined. They were apparently chosen a priori by the authors, but no criteria for inclusion or exclusion are mentioned.

* Other small details like discrepencies between Fig 2. and Fig 3. in describing TikTok as having half the hashtags as Instagram and Instagram has having double the hashtags as TikTok.

Overall, this report just seems like fodder for the anti-TikTok crowd, not a dispassionate inquiry into how TikTok trends relfect CCP narrative building.