Who’s Afraid of TikTok? How a dancing app became a geopolitical force

Imagine that in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was allowed to provide television programming for the entire Western world. This is pretty much the situation the world is in now due to the huge popularity of the video app TikTok, owned by a Chinese company. At least that argued recently American technology ethicist Tristan Harris, director of the Center for Humane Technology think tank and “the conscience of Silicon Valley,” according to the magazine The Atlantic.

It’s even worse, according to Harris. Because you have to imagine that the communist Soviet Union, in that fantasy scenario of the Cold War, also had artificial intelligence at its disposal. This allowed her to tailor her propaganda perfectly to each individual TV set in the Western world. Just like TikTok, with its Chinese parent company, now that the endless stream of videos that each user sees is perfectly tailored to that individual user.

TikTok has grown into the second most popular social media app (after YouTube) among American youth. People in their twenties are also increasingly using the app, and not just for entertainment. A quarter of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty say they are regular get news from TikTok.

In the Netherlands, the platform with its ultra-short, vertical films has an estimated 3.5 million users. 42 percent of Dutch young people between the ages of 15 and 19 are on TikTok every day, according to a poll earlier this year.

But while the app is loved by young people across much of the world, critics, including politicians, see it as a serious threat. First of all, a threat to the privacy of its users, because TikTok collects so much personal data about them. And it is quite conceivable that that data will fall into the hands of the Chinese government, even though the Chinese parent company ByteDance is not a state-owned company.

TikTok has broken the hegemony of American Big Tech companies

In addition, TikTok would also be a threat to national security – for the same reason, but also because China could influence the information provision, mentality and culture of an entire generation through TikTok. And finally, TikTok is also considered an economic threat in the United States. Because for the first time, a large, non-American tech company has succeeded in breaking through the hegemony of the American Big Tech giants such as Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and Google (parent company of YouTube).

Initially seen as a harmless children’s app for fun dances and songs, TikTok has now become the stakes of a geopolitical showdown on the internet, with superpowers and rivals China and the United States suspicious of each other. That distrust is reinforced on the American side by the fact that TikTok cannot be downloaded in China. The Chinese parent company has a different, cleaned-up version of TikTok for the home market, called Douyin.

Read also: Where is the European TikTok?

China is well aware, according to technology ethicist Harris, that social media can be addictive and thus harmful, opium for the people. Children under the age of fourteen are therefore not allowed to use social media for longer than forty minutes at a time, and not at all after ten o’clock in the evening. In addition, the videos that users of Douyin are presented with are fundamentally different from the types of videos that tempt users of TikTok to keep scrolling.

TikTok’s algorithms prioritize light-hearted clips that propagate a superficial, commercial culture of influencers, consumerism and vanity, Harris said. While the sister app for China mainly presents its young users with videos that are educational, about history or chemistry experiments, promote museum visits and patriotism.

Spinach or opium

“It’s like feeding their own people spinach while supplying the rest of the world with opium,” Harris recently said in a statement. podcast on edge. No wonder, he thinks, that American children list influencers as their favorite profession, while Chinese children say they want to become astronauts or scientists when they grow up.

The criticism of TikTok is not new. In 2020, then-President Trump already tried to ban TikTok in the United States, or to have it taken over by Microsoft, Oracle, Walmart or another “very American company”, as he called it. Nothing came of it. But several states and the US military have banned the use of TikTok on work phones — which hasn’t stopped military personnel from using the app on their own devices.

TikTok assures that it will not transfer data from US users to China, and promises to use data centers in the US. But the call for a ban on TikTok has flared up again. The FBI warns that the app can be misused for espionage purposes.

In the United States, Republican senator Marco Rubio, among others, is calling for a ban. “We need to ban this potential spy software before it’s too late.” Republicans have introduced a bill to that effect in the House of Representatives.

In the Netherlands, Member of Parliament Don Ceder of the Christen Unie called for adjustments or a ban on TikTok last month. Internet entrepreneur Alexander Klöpping calls for a ban throughout the European Union. Klöpping warned in the talk show Jinek expanded for the risks associated with the app. “We just have to trust that the Chinese will not use their geopolitical strings in such a way that there is a certain interest in the Netherlands or a politician that they want to put forward.”

Read also: Kids love being on TikTok. But how safe is it there?

Rogier Creemers, lecturer in China law and policy at Leiden University, understands the concerns about TikTok. “The scare scenario is that someone high up in Beijing tells ByteDance: ‘we want you at TikTok to prioritize this content that is beneficial to our interests and that what goes against our interests is deprived of priority’. All China then does is rearrange certain information that is already on TikTok anyway, in a way that is completely invisible from the outside. But it can have a significant influence on public opinion. There is a lot of fear about that in the United States.”

But the risks of TikTok should not be exaggerated, warns Graham Webster, a professor at Stanford University in California. research project leads on the geopolitical power of China’s digital economy. “The risk of personal data ending up with the Chinese government is real. But it should be possible to get that problem under control if TikTok stores all its data in the US and accepts control of its way of working.”

According to Webster, the risk that TikTok can manipulate people’s views is exaggerated. “Such manipulation is difficult, and the efforts of the Chinese government to date have been amateurish and ineffective. It may become a bigger threat in the future. But the idea that TikTok is “opium” compared to its sister app’s “spinach” for China is ludicrous. The Chinese Douyin is indeed very different from TikTok, but mainly because the Chinese government strictly censors and Douyin must comply with Chinese law.”

Webster has no doubt that the criticism of TikTok will continue in the coming years, “if only because some ambitious Republicans who want to run for president are making it a big deal.” But arguing for a ban on the popular app also carries political risks – because doing so will not endear politicians to the many millions of ardent TikTok users, who are also voters or would-be voters.

“Countries should have legal rules to protect personal data – and that regulation should not only apply to TikTok, but to all social media companies. If a company does not comply with the rules, and in Europe, for example, violates the GDPR data protection law, it should be penalized and, in extreme cases, banned.”

Intelligence Service

When you talk about misuse of personal data, you should look beyond TikTok, Webster believes. Then you should also take a closer look at American companies such as Facebook. Because the problems are much broader than just TikTok.

“In the US we don’t have a national privacy law. All kinds of American companies and companies from all over the world create apps that collect and sell a huge amount of information about users. The threat to privacy and national security is very real. Because that data, whether collected by a bad weather app or by TikTok, can be sold to foreign governments. If I worked for an intelligence agency I would definitely use it. That is a risk that receives relatively little attention.”

Joanne Gray, lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, sees a positive aspect of TikTok’s rapid growth. “It is often said that the size of Big Tech companies, and the sheer number of users they have, makes it impossible for new entrants to break through. But TikTok has shown that it is still possible to build up a large international market share in a very short time.

“If TikTok is banned, we have less competition, less pressure on other companies to innovate, and that is bad for consumers. We could really use more competition in this sector. I only wish social media would also compete on issues of public interest: who has the most secure platform, who is most responsible with personal data.”