What a strange study... They seem to just count the number of videos on certain hashtags. The huge discrepancy would require a very large fraction (but not all) of videos under certain hashtags to be banned/removed entirely. That would be immediately obvious when just uploading videos under that hashtags (which they don't do)

They simply dismiss the alternate explanation .. that it's a demographic difference or a time difference. Uygher stuff was a hot topic before Tiktok became popular. And people that are super pumped about that issue and are posting about Chinese political issues probably are I'm guessing not the kind of people to be using Tiktok. Those are just wild guesses.. but there are a lot of ways to explain the difference observed here.

In any case.. just mildly muting topics is pretty benign.. I was expecting promoting conspiracy theories or bots posting AI generated videos. The stuff the Russians (and I think Chinese as well?) botfarms do on Facebook is way crazier