A veritable descent into hell: over the past three months, TikTok has gone through the worst weeks of its existence: tough interrogation of its CEO before a Senate inquiry committee in the United States, threat of banning or forced sale, “measures” or laws to exclude the social network from the phones of Western public officials.
The one who is accused of being a trojan horse of the chinese communist party watched, helpless, as these prohibitions fell one following the other, like a row of dominoes. After the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, France, Belgium and the European Commission banned their officials from using this social network on their work phones. But what did TikTok do to be so shouted down? At a time when the US Congress seems galvanized to push the Chinese platform out of the United States, it is time to return to the origins of TikTok’s disgrace.
The Sino-American rivalry
Things certainly wouldn’t have gone this far if TikTok hadn’t been… Chinese. Because if the technological and political rivalry between the United States and China has been simmering for years, it finally burst at the end of the 2010s. In 2019, Beijing is clearly displaying its ambitions. His message: the country will replace the United States in the first place of world leadership. His “Made in China 2025” plan, intended to dominate the tech of tomorrow, convinces Donald Trump to launch hostilities. The impulsive President of the United States increases tariffs on Chinese products exported to the country, blacklists Chinese flagships like Huawei, and drops this sentence, ” we will ban TikTok ” in L’Air Force One in August 2020… to everyone’s surprise.
Three years earlier, the social network had been propelled to the United States, the result of the desire of ByteDance, a Chinese start-up, to launch into social networks. The latter had created “Douyin” for the Chinese market, before developing its twin for the West: TikTok. And to facilitate its entry into the American market, it had bought Musical.ly, an app already available across the Atlantic with which TikTok will merge. From the first months, the success was dazzling. He is so flamboyant that he caught the attention of CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
The risks of espionage
In 2019, this institution decides to open an investigation. Because TikTok, like all social networks, collects the personal data of its users to monetize them. Potentially, the app has access to the microphone, the camera, the contacts, or even the geolocation data of each user. Is the data collected sent to China and transmitted to the Chinese government, which might use this lever to spy on personalities? The CFIUS is already asking the question, citing the threat to the country’s national security.
Because in the line of fire, this committee is pointing to a chinese law of 2017 which obliges local businesses to covertly support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence services if they ask for it. This collaboration is also valid for companies that do not operate on Chinese soil, which might in fact apply to TikTok. If in doubt, at the end of 2019, the app was banned on army and navy smartphones.
And during the summer of 2020, what was still only an administrative investigation will take a more muscular turn with Donald Trump, who has just started a trade war with China. President accuses the network of being in the pay of Beijing – an allegation that TikTok will continue to refute. After the ban, the option of forced sale is put on the table. Things will go far since Oracle will even position itself to buy the social network.
But ultimately, when Joe Biden comes to power in 2021, Donald Trump’s executive orders are reversed. The new President asks the Department of Commerce to take care of TikTok’s data processing. And for several months, the social network breathes… trying to show its credentials. He presents in August 2022 his “ project Texas “, a plan that would allow, according to the platform, to put an end to the concerns of the Americans. Concretely, the American activities of TikTok would be grouped together in a new subsidiary, TikTok US Data Security. Its leaders would be controlled by the US government. And no more ties would exist with China.
The respite from the social network will not last very long. Because if, until now, no case of espionage had ended up in the public square, an episode will ruin all of TikTok’s efforts at the end of 2022… and relaunch the regulatory vice.
The episode of spying on journalists
The sequence takes place in December 2022. It is revealed by journalists from Forbes, who publish a sensational investigation. The American media explains that employees of ByteDance, working in China, would have tried to identify the sources of Anglo-Saxon journalists of BuzzFeedof Financial Times a you New York Times. The parent company of TikTok would have sought to identify “moles”, employees of the platform who would have communicated several sensitive information to these journalists. To do this, she would have compared the location data of the reporters, recovered thanks to TikTok, with those of the employees suspected of being the source of the leaks.
In Washington, the case has the effect of a bomb. This is proof that TikTok spies on many American users, says the White House. From the end of December, the banning process was relaunched. A law which planned to remove the application from civil servants’ phones is passed. And the measure will snowball in the West. It will be adopted in many countries, including France. Our country has thus decided to exclude the social network from all the professional telephones of its public officials – along with other applications.
At the beginning of March, the White House also displayed for the first time its very official support for a bill aimed at completely banning the social network from American soil.
For its part, TikTok is trying to put out the fire: yes, it recognizes that ByteDance employees have used the application to locate, thanks to their IP address, journalists who were reporting on the company. But it was a ” unfortunate initiative “taken by employees who have all been dismissed, and which was contrary to the code of good conduct of the company, explained the company to AFP. THE MEA culpa has no effect: the FBI has not only opened an investigation into this case, according to Forbes. But the CEO of TikTok is summoned before a US Congress commission of inquiry. And his performance on Thursday, March 23 will in no way calm the fury of American deputies.
Alongside the risks of espionage, other elements have accentuated the regulatory stranglehold of the United States and its allies. In addition to cases of censorship on the platform, mentioned by IRSEM researcher Paul Charon on March 20 during his hearing before the commission of inquiry of the French Senate on TikTok, the network is also accused of harming the mental health of adolescents. In the line of sight: its algorithm which makes the network very addictive and which would tend to highlight problematic content such as videos advocating anorexia or dangerous games.
Read also : How social media is destroying the mental health of children and adolescents
And if the criticisms are so strong, it is also because the social network is above all a very (and too) powerful instrument of soft power, used by 1.7 billion people worldwide. In the United States, the platform with 150 million local users is watched almost as much as Netflix, according to a recent study. Leaving such a powerful instrument in the hands of a rival is definitely not an option, the American authorities believe implicitly. Will the latter really end up banning the social network in the United States, and will the measure be followed by the rest of the West? Answer in the next few months.
