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Between fear for national security, suspicions of espionage on the part of China, and dangers for the mental health of young people, TikTok is in the storm. For several months, the Chinese network has fed all the criticisms of the West, with the United States as the figurehead. But is TikTok even more harmful than the American giants Meta or Twitter, which are already not very exemplary in terms of data protection?
The Chinese platform TikTok is more than ever in the hot seat. After the European Commission, the US federal agenciesthe United Kingdom or even Canada, it is France’s turn to prohibit its 2.5 million civil servants from using ” recreational applications ”, including the controversial Chinese social network TikTok, on their work phones.
A decision that comes the day after muscular hearing of Shou Zi Chew, boss of TikTok, before the American Congress. For several hours, the CEO of the subsidiary of the Chinese group ByteDance tried to defend his platform and somehow reassure the concerns of American elected officials. On Wednesday March 22, during a press conference, Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman wondered: “Why so much hysteria around TikTok? ”, arguing that the platform presents the same risks in terms of data confidentiality or misinformation as “ Facebook, Instagram, YouTube et Twitter ».
Is this really the case ? Is TikTok really a separate social network? RFI put the question to Fabrice Epelboin, specialist in social media and cybersecurity, and teacher at Sciences Po.
RFI: Does the Chinese application TikTok represent an even worse threat than Facebook or Twitter?
Fabrice Epelboin : In terms of privacy and data protection, no. The risk is similar. There are fears on the part of TikTok of espionage, mass surveillance, influence for political purposes or the instrumentalization of data by a third party. But these are things we’ve seen in the past on US networks, like with the scandal Cambridge Analytica in 2016, the Facebook Files in 2021, or Twitter Files in 2022, which revealed operations of interference in foreign public opinion between Twitter and the American Pentagon. So on the question of TikTok, the issue is above all geopolitical. The only real difference is to assess the danger of entrusting the protection of privacy and our data to China, or to the United States. And from what we have observed over the past ten years, Europe is leaning more towards the second option.
So why France, the U.S.the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, have they all chosen to prohibit the use of this platform by its agents of the State?
From a geopolitical point of view, these countries represent, with the exception of France, the “ Fives Eyes “, an alliance formed after the Second World War around the sharing of information from the intelligence services. And these English-speaking countries know perfectly well that if the Chinese imitate what the American cybersecurity services have done for the last ten years with social networks, the Americans risk very big. As the National Security Agency (NSA) has already interfered with data from social networks, Washington is well aware of what Beijing could do with data similar. That’s what scares them. So the United States wants to end TikTok as soon as possible. The concern is that they cannot justify this position other than by implicitly admitting that they have done the same thing.
Is it more of an ideological battle between the West and China?
No, we are not yet in a cultural battle, but rather at the attack stage, with Facebook on one side and TikTok on the other. So far, there are no particularly disturbing suspicions of business involving the Chinese network or hard evidence that TikTok is serving as a data vacuum for China. But this ideological war is precisely what Europe fears : that Beijing injects certain values, Washington others, and that the Europeans find themselves in the middle.
It is also a huge economic issue. Meta has every interest in not being overtaken by TikTok, which is moreover much more efficient in certain aspects, such as its algorithm, which offers a qualitative flow of information even when you do not yet have any friends. From a purely financial point of view, the Americans have every interest in keeping the Chinese out of the market, if only to support the share price of Meta or Twitter.
Les éUnited States talk about the issue of ” national security is this a well-founded fear?
Quite because with the data obtained from TikTok users, the ByteDance subsidiary could pass it on to other companies, the Chinese government, the intelligence services… who could then do with it what they want. For now, these are guesses. But what is certain is that with an update to the application, TikTok could have access to information that a platform is not normally allowed to see, by infiltrating loopholes in the security. It is a great classic of espionage. It has already happened with the Pegasus case, who used a security flaw on phones to scrutinize Telegram or WhatsApp chats. So in the minds of Western policymakers, it’s possible the Chinese could update TikTok to spy on foreign officials. From a cybersecurity perspective, that’s believable. And in this environment, we do not wait to have legal proof to act. Seeing several countries take precautions by banning the application sends a strong signal to society: there is indeed a problem with data protection and interference on social networks. And this date problem certainly did not appear with TikTok. The case of the Chinese network only reveals it.
And if TikTok is also scary, is it also because of its effect on young people?
Exactly. This is the second key issue around TikTok: its designers have succeeded in connecting all the brains of adolescents and children. And Americans are extremely privileged consumers of it. [près de la moitié des Américains consulte la plateforme chaque mois, selon une analyse de l’entreprise Digimind en 2023, NDLR]. Except that it can become very problematic if Beijing decides to export certain information or propaganda to young people, via the network. On mental health specifically, I don’t think the effect of TikTok is necessarily different from the effect that Instagram or Facebook can have.
But what raises questions are the monumental consumption rates of TikTok, its speed of penetration on the market, the time spent on the application or even the commitment, that is to say the number of times that one user opens the network per day. It’s one of the fastest growing social apps in the world, and all indicators show that TikTok is even more addictive than Instagram or Twitter. It is this strength that the platform holds that worries.
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