AI 中文总结
研究TikTok政治内容差异可见性，通过对多账户多视频的密集面板数据测试，发现传统分析的传播差距是伪重复和混淆所致，实际无传播抑制，还明确了可信可见性审核要求。
AI 中文摘要
有关TikTok对政治内容进行隐藏封禁的指控影响了创作者发布内容、广告商投资及监管机构行动，但因平台不披露内容排名方式而难以判定。我们用密集的每小时面板数据对67个账户的2753个视频进行测试，这些视频按支持和反对三个争议话题（美国移民执法、特朗普报道、以色列/巴勒斯坦）分类。通过多步分类器识别主题视频，立场取自账户分类。传统分析似乎支持封禁说法，但按账户层面分析差距消失。我们未发现对任何主题有中等到大程度的传播抑制证据，这种差异是由伪重复和混淆两个因素造成的。最后提出了可信可见性审核的要求。
英文摘要
Allegations that TikTok shadow bans political content shape what creators post, what advertisers fund, and how regulators act, yet they are hard to adjudicate because platforms do not disclose how content is ranked. We test the claim with a dense hourly panel of 556,946 follower-normalized views across 2,753 videos from 67 accounts curated into pro and anti sides of three contested topics (U.S. immigration enforcement, Trump coverage, and Israel/Palestine). On-topic videos are identified by a multi-step classifier, and stance is taken from each account's curated side. The conventional analysis appears to answer yes. Pooling the hourly snapshots, the topic-conditional reach gap reaches p < 10^-140. Analyzed at the account level, the independent unit at which we sample and assign stance, the gap disappears. Every account-level reach contrast is null after correction (BH-FDR q near 0.9). We find no evidence of moderate-to-large reach suppression on any topic. The null is informative. Account-level confidence intervals and a power analysis rule out such effects. As a design check, the same framework detects a clear asymmetry on a different outcome. Oppositional content (anti-Trump, pro-Palestine) earns more engagement per view rather than less reach (Cliff's delta = -0.51 and -0.64; q < 0.03). Higher engagement does not by itself rule out suppression, but shows the design can detect effects of this magnitude. The apparent reach gap is an artifact of two factors. The first is pseudoreplication, which counts tens of thousands of autocorrelated video-hours as independent observations; the second is confounding, since the side that looks suppressed is larger and, on Israel/Palestine, posts mostly in Arabic. In this corpus, what is taken for a shadow ban is better explained by a more engaged audience than by a suppressed one. We close with what a credible visibility audit requires.
Comments14 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables
