Autopsy of an increasingly controversial social network on the Old Continent. After X (formerly Twitter) in December, the European Commission is now looking into the case of TikTok. Brussels announced this Monday, February 19, that it had opened an investigation targeting the Chinese giant, suspected of violating the new regulation on digital services, the Digital Service Act (DSA). The text came into full force on Saturday, with obligations now imposed on all online platforms, under penalty of fines, to better protect users against illegal content.
At the top of the concerns of the European policeman, the absence of transparency on advertising and access to data for researchers, but also and above all, shortcomings in the protection of minors. This involves, for example, examining “the age verification tools used by TikTok to prevent minors’ access to inappropriate content” or even assessing the “risks linked to addictive design” and “to harmful content.
An addictive algorithm
“As a platform reaching millions of children and adolescents, TikTok has a special role to play in protecting minors online”, which is “one of the key priorities of the DSA”, said the European Commissioner at the Internal Market, Thierry Breton. This is why Brussels intends to dissect one by one the means implemented by the social network to reduce the risks “arising from the design of the TikTok system, including algorithmic systems, which can stimulate behavioral addictions”, the Commission specified this Monday.
Last year, centrist senator Claude Malhuret expressed to L’Express his deep concern about TikTok’s ability to get our young people addicted. “This app has the most addictive algorithm […] Where a YouTube needs several hours to identify your tastes and desires, TikTok does it in a few tens of seconds, because the content it displays is much shorter,” he warned, deploring that Westerners (make proof) of a confounding naivety”.
Douyin and TikTok, fraternal twins
And for good reason, Chinese and Western citizens do not have access to the same version of TikTok. And so, not the same content. Within the borders of the Middle Kingdom, only the Douyin application, the Chinese version of TikTok, is authorized. However, after analyzing it, the agency specializing in Chinese digital marketing Tenba Group noted a much greater presence of educational content on Douyin than on its Western twin, TikTok, which for its part offers more entertaining videos, dances, gags, or songs.
“They are like two twin platforms separated at birth, developed under the same roof but implemented in two very different contexts,” observed Tenba Group with our colleagues from the BBC last April. In addition, the processing and storage of data is also different there. While Douyin’s data is stored in China, that of foreign users is supposed to be kept outside the world’s 2nd largest economy.
Data, Chinese interference abroad…
However, doubts about the use of data persist, and have pushed the French executive to ask the 2.5 million agents who make up the state civil service to delete the application from their mobile phones.
And although Instagram and asks for it,” warned Claude Malhuret in the columns of L’Express. And to insist: “This also questions the tolerance that TikTok could have towards influence operations (disinformation, censorship, etc.) carried out by China”. And European regulatory authorities know this only too well.