The rapid rise of the Chinese app raises alarms about surveillance and privacy, and lawmakers around the world are debating whether to restrict or even ban its use. The fear is that Beijing will use the platform to promote its interests. TikTok is in the crosshairs. Lawmakers around the world are debating how to restrict, if not ban, the use of the Chinese streaming video service, which has become one of the most popular apps among teenagers.
While the European Union (EU) is on the cusp of implementing legislation that will force TikTok to aggressively police harmful content, countries like the United States and Japan are pondering how to regulate the app — or even follow India’s lead and ban it altogether.
The fear is that China’s government could hijack TikTok to further its interests. Like the Trojan horse in Greek mythology, they warn, Beijing could use the app to gain access to sensitive user data and spread misleading information.
“There are legitimate concerns about possible surveillance by the Chinese regime,” Estelle Massé of Access Now, a Brussels-based digital rights nonprofit, told DW.
For her, TikTok also deserves a lot of attention “because it is the fastest growing social media in the world, and its demographic is very young”.
The app’s parent company, Chinese tech conglomerate ByteDance, has long come under scrutiny over how it collects and processes user data. But pressure on regulators to rein in the platform has mounted since it was revealed in December that ByteDance employees accessed data from Western journalists to identify sources who leaked information to media outlets.
A TikTok spokeswoman told DW that the incident was “misconduct by certain individuals, who are no longer employed by ByteDance.” She also added that since then, the protocols for who can access users’ data “have been significantly tightened”. According to the spokeswoman, although TikTok user data was stored in data centers outside of China, “some limited employee access” to information in China was necessary “to support our global community”.
At the same time, it insisted that “we have never been asked to provide TikTok user data to the Chinese government and we have never provided data to it.”
How TikTok has grown so much
The app’s rapid rise is unprecedented in the history of the internet. In just a few years, it’s grown from a niche kids’ voiceover app to one of the world’s leading social media platforms, which users increasingly turn to for research or news.
TikTok was launched by ByteDance in the global market in 2018, modeled after its Chinese app Douyin. In September 2021, the platform announced that it had reached 1 billion monthly active users – a milestone that took Facebook more than eight years to reach. Download statistics suggest that the number has continued to grow since then. TikTok does not provide information on the current number of users, citing company policy.
The key to the app’s success, analysts agree, is TikTok’s For You page — an individualized stream of videos that looks different to each user. It starts automatically as soon as the app is opened and analyzes everything that catches the user’s attention, such as how long they watch a video before moving on to the next one. So, over time, the software learns more and more about the user and adapts the videos to their interests.
“At the end of the day, the algorithm on the For You page has a pretty obvious goal,” said Martin Degeling of the Berlin-based think tank Foundation New Responsibility, who analyzed TikTok’s recommendation system. “It’s about estimating what will pique users’ interest at exactly that moment and keep them on the platform for as long as possible.”
Can TikTok be hijacked?
As users increasingly use the app as a news source – with major media outlets, including DW, regularly posting to the platform – critics warn that its powerful algorithm can be abused to deliberately spread misinformation.
US officials such as FBI Director Chris Wray have specifically warned that the Beijing government could “manipulate the content” of the app to sway public opinion or sow social unrest abroad.
“The danger of TikTok being used to deliberately spread misinformation is real,” says Martin Degeling. However, he does not consider “it to be significantly higher than on other social media platforms”.
TikTok’s spokeswoman rejects the allegations, arguing that the platform is striving to “proactively limit the spread of misleading information”. As an example, she points to partnerships with fact-checking organizations and a new initiative that alerts users when videos are uploaded by “accounts managed by entities whose editorial production or decision-making process is subject to the control or influence of a government”.
Is there a “TikTok brain”?
In addition, there is the discussion about what impact the use of the application can have on the mental health of its predominantly young users. In the United States, for example, more than two-thirds of all teens use the app, according to a 2022 study by think tank Pew Research Center.
Some health experts have warned that TikTok’s design promotes addictive behavior. Others say that too much time spent on the app can affect cognitive abilities, such as decreasing attention span or even triggering anxiety or depression – a phenomenon that has been labeled the “TikTok brain”. Faced with this scenario, China passed rules that limit the use of Douyin – equivalent to TikTok – to 40 minutes a day for children under 14 years old.
But so far, there hasn’t been enough scientific evidence for that, according to Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a researcher at the Berlin-based Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “We simply don’t know yet what TikTok does to its users’ psyches and behavior,” he told DW.
“TikTok is a new platform and there is no historical precedent that we can learn from,” he points out. At the same time, TikTok “makes it difficult for researchers to investigate its impact because it offers little access to its data,” he adds.
imminent regulation
In the European Union, at least, that could change when new laws come into force in autumn and early next year. They will force particularly large social platforms to, among other things, provide EU-controlled researchers with information about their inner workings. The EU has yet to specify whether TikTok will be among these big platforms, but it is widely expected that it will.
Meanwhile, US lawmakers in the House of Representatives this month vote on a bill that seeks to ban the app. If approved, it could give the White House the legal means to ban the platform nationwide over national security concerns.
TikTok is trying to stop that from happening. ByteDance lobbyists have been visiting the offices of Washington DC and Brussels legislators to persuade them to relax the laws. Simultaneously, TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew is touring world capitals to meet with decision makers.
The move comes after years of TikTok trying to push the boundaries of how it collects and processes user data, notes Massé of Access Now. At the same time, she points out that collecting massive amounts of data has long become common practice on large-scale social media platforms.
“The fact that we still have doubts about TikTok is kind of a sad common industry pattern,” he said. That’s why she warns that when monitoring TikTok, governments must not lose sight of what other platforms, like US Instagram, are doing.
“It’s fair that TikTok is at the center of the storm, but it could also be convenient for other platforms to hide behind TikTok while doing the same or similar practices,” says Massé.
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