In the parallel world of TikTok, the skies are blue, the birds are singing, and the gossip around Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber is hogging the attention. Fans of the Chinese app have already seen the threat of a TikTok ban brandished in 2020, but it never materialized. So they don’t worry about it more than that at the moment. Wrongly. The cloud hanging over the digital Eden of teenagers is more threatening than ever. In the United States, the discourse of the authorities has hardened considerably in recent months.
“TikTok is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” the commissioner of the US Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr told L’Express without taking gloves on last December. The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives took up the subject. The US Senate too: on March 7, two of its members, John Thune and Mark Warner, tabled a bill aimed at expanding the powers of the Commerce Department over the technologies of countries such as China. “The possibility that TikTok will be banned in the United States has become very credible”, analyzes Julien Nocetti, associate researcher in the Geopolitics of Technologies program at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri).
The French Senate dissects TikTok
The Commission and the European Parliament also recently prohibited their staff from installing the application on their work phones. And in France a Senate inquiry commission opens this Monday, March 13 to study the use and strategy of TikTok. How did a goofy video app become public enemy number one? The most critical voices across the Atlantic are quick to denounce the addictive aspect of its operation. Its endless succession of very short video clips is, it is true, hypnotic. And TikTok’s AI is proving to be devilishly good at choosing videos that keep users glued to the screen. Result: in 6 and a half years of existence, the application has exceeded the milestone of one billion users.
In the United States, Americans spend more time on TikTok than on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. The app even blows Netflix’s neck: according to Insider Intelligence, users over 18 will spend 58 minutes a day on TikTok in 2024 compared to 62 minutes on Reed Hasting’s platform. The success of TikTok with very young people also fuels fears. In France, more than half of 8 to 11 year olds have an account (Themis 2021 study).
And this poses a problem because the app is not suitable for such a young audience, Axelle Desaint, director of Internet without fear, told us in a recent interview. “TikTok encourages them to expose themselves, since it is based on the production of images and videos. At the start, when you have not yet fed the algorithm of TikTok, it moreover tends to push videos of quite sexualized choreographies of young girls and young women. The children see them and say to themselves ‘OK, this is how I have to introduce myself.’ They therefore stage themselves in outfits and postures that are out of step with their age. Without having aware of course of the public to which they are exposed.”
The cries of outrage uttered by the Americans on these subjects are, however, a little hypocritical. Despite its meteoric rise, the operation of TikTok is basically no more addictive than that of a Facebook in its heyday. The questionable content that can be found there (the promotion of excessively retouched faces and bodies, for example) is not very far from what exists on networks like Instagram. And user age verification is as symbolic and easy to circumvent on TikTok as it is on its US rivals.
A global social network is a powerful weapon
The nervousness of Americans comes from the fact that they know better than anyone that a world-class social network can be a powerful weapon. Two specific scenarios worry them about TikTok. Spying first, with the fear that Beijing could obtain data from the application concerning targeted users. The idea is not far-fetched concerning an authoritarian regime like that of China. And a case has already tarnished the image of TikTok on this subject, ByteDance having recognized that employees of the China group had exceeded its rules and accessed in a non-compliant manner the personal data of American journalists who were investigating it precisely.
“The United States also fears that Beijing could use TikTok to carry out influence operations”, underlines Julien Nocetti. Such a scenario could result in the promotion of narratives favorable to the interests of Beijing or narratives unfavorable to those of its opponents.
How TikTok tries to reassure its customers
TikTok is struggling to reassure internationally and is restructuring so that the personal data of Americans and Europeans stays on their soil. However, this is unlikely to be enough to reassure. “Localizing data storage is a first step, but the question is precisely who administers their data centers and who has access to them. Will other servers in China or technical administrators, for example, be able to access European servers?” asks Gérôme Billois, partner in charge of cybersecurity and digital trust at Wavestone.
And even if the personal data remains in the area, it is impossible to control the operation of the app. Like its American competitors, the group does not allow the public to look under its hood. And even if it did, “it would be very difficult to spot the changes that are continuously being made to the algorithms and to assess the impact this will have on what users will see”, explains Gérôme Billois.
The difficulty in the digital sphere is that updates can change the face of an application overnight. “Even if an external auditor finds that everything is fine, it may not be the case the next day and no country wants to put the means to check this permanently”, confides the cybersecurity partner of Wavestone. Chinese flagship, the telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei had also tried to reassure Westerners by opening “transparency centers” and inviting its customers to check its operation, this had not been enough to put it back on track to the international when Washington had sidelined it (and encouraged its allies to do the same).
These cyber risks are of course not unique to China, similar scenarios could be imagined with American applications. “What tips the scales is always the nature of the links between countries: is it rather an ally or a country that we fear?” Sums up a good connoisseur of the subject. The hostility towards TikTok unequivocally shows which way the slider is leaning right now.