Are the days of TikTok numbered? If the scenario of the end of the Chinese giant in the West is still far from being recorded, the question is becoming more and more recurrent. In the United States, the social network is already banned in the House of Representatives and federal agencies. At the end of February, the European Commission also asked its employees to remove the app as soon as possible. But the social network, the subject of a Senate investigation committee, could it simply be banned?
• What is TikTok blamed for?
Given the success of the Chinese application, very popular among Western children and adolescents, various types of criticism are recurrent. First of all, about the collection of personal data. Like all social networks, TikTok has access to a lot of user information: browsing history, conversations, centers of interest, location, contact list and, of course, access to the mobile camera and microphone.
But unlike Facebook or Twitter, TikTok, like any Chinese company, must work in the interests of the Chinese government. In addition, the company admitted that certain data from Western users -and therefore French- were accessible from China, without agreeing to specify which ones. Which raises fears of massive espionage of hundreds of millions of users around the world (15 million in France) by the Beijing regime.
Other criticisms refer to the content that TikTok broadcasts to the youngest. While in China the government forces the platform to frame the videos that are presented and considerably limit the time spent on TikTok, its western version manages to capture the attention of users in unprecedented proportions: the youngest spend twice as much time on TikTok than on its competitor Instagram, whose attention-grabbing skills have already been proven.
• Who could ban TikTok?
In the United States, a ban on TikTok could be made at the federal level. This was foreseen by Donald Trump, starting in 2020, before Joe Biden reconsidered these measures the following year.
With regard to the French market, such a decision will most likely be taken at the European level, to ensure consistency in all the countries of the European Union. It is also in Brussels where the leaders of the Chinese company are trying to convince elected officials that TikTok does not pose a danger to users. In January 2023, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, called on TikTok to be more transparent about how its algorithms work.
• How could TikTok be banned?
Technically, the TikTok ban should be based on several elements. First, the banishment of the Apple and Google application stores (App Store and Play Store). Which would make it impossible to download TikTok on the mobile again.
But TikTok is not only accessible from smartphones. The social network is available through its website. At this level, the ban would go through Internet service providers, who would then take it upon themselves to block all connections to TikTok’s servers. Google could also be involved, removing links to the platform.
An operation of this type has already been launched, precisely for a Chinese platform, Wish. Implicated by the many counterfeit and dangerous products it sold, the company saw its app disappear from app stores and its site made invisible on Google, at the request of the Ministry of Economy, at the end of 2021.
• Could the TikTok ban be circumvented?
Like all measures to prevent access to a website, the TikTok ban could be circumvented. First by configuring your smartphone to access a foreign app store, but also using other tools like a VPN, again to simulate a connection from a third country, where TikTok would remain authorized.
But for users, the main consequence would likely be a significant drop in French-language content production, making the social network far less relevant than it may be today.
Source: BFM TV
