“The art of war is to subdue the enemy without combat,” wrote military strategist Sun Tzu. This sentence resonates strangely at a time when TikTok and the United States are at loggerheads. The social network originating from China is considered there as a cognitive weapon, a tool of espionage and influence hidden behind a cascade of videos of happy passions and childish jokes. At the end of April, in a rare transpartisan movement, Congress passed a law aimed at banning the application within a year, if it does not cut its ties with the Middle Kingdom by then. So, bye bye TikTok?
The case against the app is, in reality, shakier than it seems. And there are good and bad reasons to be wary of this social network. The most solid relate to public health, and are precisely those that Europe has chosen to investigate. Is TikTok studying in depth the risks, particularly of “behavioral dependence”, that its tool creates? What does he do to alleviate them? Does it sufficiently prevent minors from accessing inappropriate content? To these questions, TikTok has not yet provided satisfactory answers. This is why it is the subject of two investigations opened by the European Commission.
The United States regularly highlights two other threats: that Beijing will use TikTok to spy on Westerners and to influence their opinions. Despite the heated debates across the Atlantic, the file, at this level, is however thin. In 2022, ByteDance Ltd, the parent company of TikTok, indicated that employees of the group had used data from the platform to track down journalists who had written about it. The group affirmed that this was an initiative that it had in no way ordered and that it condemned before dismissing the perpetrators. The matter can, however, legitimately cause concern. A few months later, the European Commission and Parliament banned their staff from using TikTok on their professional devices.
A political war
Apart from this case, the American authorities have hardly presented any concrete evidence. TikTok has agreed to make unprecedented efforts in the world of social networks in order to host user data from these areas in the United States and Europe (the Texas and Clover projects). Furthermore, “there are no concrete elements suggesting that the application would censor certain narratives, for example those not in the interest of China”, observes Marc Faddoul, founder of the non-profit organization non-profit AI Forensic, which investigates influential and opaque algorithms. As political science researcher Pierre Sel, co-founder of the French information and research portal on China EastIsRed, recalls: “The administration of Chinese cyberspace also has human realities. It does not have 500,000 engineers ready to decipher the ‘entire TikTok traffic worldwide.’
Basically, what the United States really criticizes TikTok are the links that it possibly still has with China. The social network claims its independence from its country of origin. “ByteDance Ltd is based in the Cayman Islands, just like many American entertainment companies,” the company reminds L’Express. Part of its management is in the United States or Europe and the majority of its investors are foreign. However, points out the report of the French Senate commission of inquiry on TikTok in 2023, this structure is probably a “variable interest entity” (VIE), a frequent organization for globalized Chinese companies, in order to have more easy access to foreign capital. Its founder, the Chinese Zhang Yiming, retains 20% of the company, specifies the document. “And in a LIFE, the number of shares is not proportional to the decision-making power,” recalls the lawyer specializing in the governance of Chinese companies, Isabelle Feng. “The application, like others, must therefore refer to the Communist Party. TikTok can defend itself, contest certain requests, but never completely oppose them. This is the principle of dictatorship,” she continues. . The French Senate’s commission of inquiry finally underlines that TikTok “needs the technologies, patents and engineers of the Beijing branch, the true heart of the ByteDance company.”
The battle Americans are getting into with TikTok is above all political. Washington has started a standoff with Beijing, which does not hide its intentions to take away its crown as the world’s leading power. This new cold war is particularly visible in the tech sector. The telecoms giant Huawei has thus been banned from American soil. Nor are Chinese submarine Internet cables welcome there. And the United States is increasingly restricting the export to China of the most sophisticated generations of chips, particularly those used by specialists in generative artificial intelligence. The path taken by the United States in the TikTok affair is, however, not without risk. The “political cost” of suspending the application could be powerful if it is not duly substantiated, thinks Mark Corcoral, doctoral student at the Center for International Research (CERI) at Sciences Po and specialist in national security policy of United States: “The ban on TikTok will allow a lot of states and anti-American political actors to point out their hypocrisy on freedom of expression.”
Europe remains dependent on China
The Old Continent has different interests and constraints from Uncle Sam. In the field of climate transition, for example, Europe is currently very dependent on China, at the forefront in the competitive cost manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles. More generally, “the European Union, since its creation, has essentially been structured around the internal market. And apart from exceptional circumstances such as the Covid period, it has posted trade surpluses for most of the last twenty-five “The majority of European countries are therefore committed to protecting free trade”, observes Bruno Alomar, author of. Reform or Insignificance. Ten years to save the European Union (Editions de l’Ecole de guerre, 2018). For Europe to attack a company without valid reason would therefore send a worrying signal.
Even if the Brussels administration had some harsh words against TikTok, it is approaching this explosive issue more skillfully than the United States. With the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), it has equipped itself with very powerful weapons to investigate digital platforms, regulate them and sanction their abuses.
This framework, unprecedented in the world, allows it to treat TikTok according to the problems it really poses, and not according to the nationality of its shareholders. This is the right method. First, because like Facebook or X, TikTok is a tool for exercising a fundamental freedom: freedom of expression and communication. “This must certainly be reconciled with other rights of constitutional value but considering that it is a very condition of democracy,” warns Marc Mossé, partner of the law firm August Debouzy and specialist in law of the regulation of digital platforms.
For this plan to work, however, two factors are fundamental. First, that Europe has the capacity to detect abuses if they occur. A challenge. “It is difficult to control the functioning of a social network recommendation algorithm. You have to use human and automated controls, using multiple accounts to have multiple angles of view and be able to measure trends over time,” confides Gérôme Billois, cybersecurity partner at Wavestone. Then, if problems are observed at TikTok, but are also observed among its American rivals, the EU will have to sanction them in the same way. This is the condition sine qua non so that its brand new rules of the game are not called into question.
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