You have to watch on TikTok the frenzied choreographies and the “trendy” policies. Faces with unreal glamor and DIY tutorials. Users crying to see themselves rejuvenated by app filters and hilarious teenage gags. Dangerous challenges, tips to become a cryptomillionaire. The nasty videos, the gossip about Justin Bieber. You have to look at all of this for two reasons.
First, because it’s a world in which young people spend more and more time and parents understand less and less. They hardly know what their children are up to there and realize even less that from the age of 8 or 9, many of them find themselves there.
You also have to look at what is being played around TikTok, which no longer has much to do with a carousel of crazy clips. It is a social network that occupies a major place in the global conversation. Many Internet users now go through it to find information before using Google. The problems posed by Facebook, Instagram or Twitter made us understand “the hard way” that the networks were not neutral. Their algorithms decide what will be shown to us frequently, or systematically hidden. And if they do not act against the malicious actors who use myriads of fake accounts, these platforms can quickly become battlegrounds of dangerous rantings, hateful content and shameless propaganda. All with consequences that could not be more concrete in the “real” world: irrational distrust of vaccines, invasion of the Capitol…
It is for these reasons that Westerners panic over the influence that an authoritarian state like China is likely to exercise on ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. So much so that the darling app for teenagers now seems to have become public enemy No. 1. Americans know better than anyone how powerful a global network is. A weapon to watch closely.