The accusations that have been made against the application range from espionage to responsibility for the death of children who followed a challenge. Despite this, its popularity has been on the rise.
Mobile entertainment sumum, espionage tool in the service of Beijing, or both? The TikTok phenomenon has made the world of social networks obsolete, but the application is already in the sights of several states that want to limit its influence.
Its CEO, Shou Zi Chew, promised Thursday at a U.S. congressional hearing that, by the end of the year, all information related to the country’s 150 million users will be handled only from servers located in the United States.
But he acknowledged that the platform, a subsidiary of China’s ByteDance Group, still has old U.S. user data stored on servers accessible to Chinese employees, as U.S. lawmakers accuse it of endangering national security.
Under pressure
TikTok was first banned in India in 2020, following deadly clashes on the border with China.
The same year, the app was also threatened with a ban in the United States by President Donald Trump, who accused it of spying.
The social network had then admitted, following an article on the BuzzFeed site, that employees based in China had had access to data relating to U.S. users but had defended itself from having passed it on to the Chinese Communist Party.
In an attempt to ensure the security of the data, the company promised U.S. and European users to store it on its territory, with local partners.
In 2023, the U.S. federal government and the European Commission banned the downloading and use of TikTok on their employees’ work devices. Now, Washington is pushing for a broader ban.
The British parliament on Thursday announced a ban on TikTok on all of its devices and networks, following a similar move a week earlier by the U.K. government.
One billion users
None of these measures have so far slowed TikTok’s meteoric rise.
The platform has more than one billion active users worldwide, including 125 million in the European Union.
It ranks sixth among the most popular social platforms, according to the agency We Are Social’s latest report on the evolution of the digital world, published in January.
TikTok also shows the strongest growth, especially among younger people.
Above all, TikTok outperforms all its competitors in its ability to capture attention. In 2023, Android users used it an average of 23 hours and 28 minutes each month.
YouTube or Meta (Facebook’s parent company, Instagram) have tried to mimic its ultra-short video format, without much success so far.
An opaque algorithm
TikTok has managed to attract many influencers, thanks in particular to its advanced video editing features, creative filters and a powerful algorithm, capable of quickly bringing up new stars.
These tiktokers, such as Khaby Lame, Charli d’Amelio and Bella Poarch, some of the best known, have attracted many brands.
But TikTok’s algorithm remains opaque.
In January, Forbes magazine revealed that TikTok and Bytedance employees regularly used a button to increase the number of views of certain content.
According to TikTok, which recently announced the launch of a feature to discover why one video stands out over another, manual promotion affects only a small fraction of recommendations.
Disinformation
Like other social networks, TikTok faces the challenge of content moderation.
It is regularly accused of hosting numerous misinformation videos, dangerous challenges and images with sexual connotations, when it is supposed to ban nudity.
In October 2022, as detected by the news website Numerama, a “trend” was to post pictures of penises.
On the other hand, media reported that several children died after trying to replicate the Blackout Challenge, a viral challenge that involves seeing how long the participant can last without breathing.
In addition, as indicated by NewsGuard in September 2022, 20% of the videos circulating on TikTok on topical issues (Russian invasion of Ukraine, school shootings in the United States, covid-19 vaccines) were fake or misleading.
AFP, like more than a dozen other fact-checking organizations, receives payments from TikTok in several countries in Asia and Oceania, Europe, the Middle East and Spanish-speaking Latin America to verify videos that potentially contain false information.
Tiktok deletes them if the AFP teams prove that the information transmitted is false.