TikTok, the video application of the Chinese group ByteDance, has met with extraordinary commercial success. It was the most downloaded app last year, reaching more than a billion users worldwide, who frantically consume its stream of short clips. If Facebook and Instagram are still respectively three and twice as big, TikTok surpasses them in its use. According Data.ai, an average US Android user spends 29 hours per month on TikTok compared to 24 hours on Facebook and Instagram. The monetization of this audience suggests dizzying financial prospects. TikTok’s revenue topped $10 billion, more than Twitter and Snapchat combined, just three years after rolling out the first ad on the platform.
But the negative consequences of this success are immense. The application is in the sights of Western governments because what is China’s greatest – if not unique – cultural success in globalization is increasingly seen as a geopolitical lever for Beijing. The amount of personal data sucked up by such an application is worrying. If Joe Biden canceled the forced sale of a majority of TikTok to Oracle and Walmart initiated under pressure from Donald Trump in 2020, the White House has just ordered employees of federal agencies to ban the application from their devices under a month, following some twenty American states. Similar decisions have been taken in recent days in Brussels by the Parliament and the European Commission. The French army plans to advise against its use by the military. A bill under discussion in Congress could even result in the total banning of TikTok in the United States. This is already the case in India, where the application was banned in 2020 by the Modi government, which accused it of conveying Chinese propaganda.
Turn everyone on the Internet into Kim Kardashian
If geopolitical reasons aren’t enough for lawmakers to cross the Rubicon, I invite them to check out the latest “Bold Glamour” filter that TikTok has been offering for a few days. Here is a tool that smooths faces, chisels jaws and cheekbones, darkens eyes and eyebrows, making Internet users look like the Kardashian sisters. It can radically alter a face. When it first appeared in 2015, this type of filter could deck us out with a pair of ears and a dog’s nose. Since then, this technology has become incredibly precise, it follows movements, even continuing to operate when you touch your face with your hand.
Such functionality is diabolical. It is a real psychological war waged on the younger generations. You have to see the devastating effects of comparison on young people, girls and boys: it weighs on their mental health, leads to low self-esteem and promotes body dysmorphia.
If no one in your family or friend circle has been affected yet, consider yourself happy, but perhaps you are deluding yourself. Psychologists have shown how Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, have high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and frailty even as alcohol and drug use and teenage pregnancies are plummeting.
No need to bring out the internal memos of social network editors alarmed by body dysmorphia, nor the medical studies on large cohorts, the figures are frightening. And young girls are particularly victims. But the addiction to TikTok is growing, even if its users are aware of its misdeeds. According to a recent global study by Qustodio, in 2022, minors spent an average of 1h47 per day on TikTok… Admittedly, the social network has just set up an alert which is triggered after one hour for users under the age of 18 years old. But the measure is anecdotal, and it shows the irresponsibility of the leaders of ByteDance… Ladies and gentlemen politicians, do not wait for the big lawsuits, in the vein of those related to tobacco, which will take place in the next decade in the States -United. Act now!