Expert opinion from Constantin Pavléas, lawyer specializing in technology law, founder and director of the firm Pavléas Avocats and head of teaching at the School of Applied Law Studies (HEAD).
Is TikTok a Trojan horse at the service of the Chinese authorities? Does the Chinese platform allow the massive capture of personal data from Internet users, and is it used to influence or even manipulate the young Western generations?
It is important to distinguish national security issues, which are the prerogative of each government, from those concerning the protection of personal data, the fight against disinformation and the manipulation of opinion and behavior, which must come under a regulatory and democratic control.
Suspecting the Chinese authorities of spying through TikTok, the White House has ordered federal institutions to ensure that TikTok disappears from their smartphones within thirty days, pursuant to a law ratified in early January by Joe Biden. The European Commission and the Canadian government recently made similar decisions for their civil servants’ mobile phones, and the Danish parliament announced that it has asked MPs and staff to remove the app from their devices. France is considering a similar ban on its civil servants’ laptops. These reactions from Western governments remind us of the measures taken against Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, on the basis of the same suspicions of espionage through 5G infrastructures.
Influence on younger generations
Beyond the argument related to national security, another threat, more insidious this one, is put forward. It is that according to which the platform’s content recommendation algorithms have the objective – and the result – of deliberately exerting an influence on the younger generations. Thus, two American senators tabled this Tuesday, March 7, 2023 a bill aimed at allowing the government to ban foreign technological products, including TikTok. It is recalled that China itself limits the access of its teenagers to video games and applications such as TikTok to a few hours a week.
At a minimum, we know that TikTok is a platform operating in China and is subject to censorship by an undemocratic regime. Does this allow us to ban this platform in our democracies? Such a ban would raise serious objections because one thing is to prohibit public officials from using the platform’s services on the basis of national security imperatives, another thing would be to extend this ban to all citizens. In the United States alone, TikTok claims more than a hundred million users, and the platform rightly believes that banning the application would amount to “censoring” millions of Americans. She is joined in this by the Association for the Defense of Civil Rights (ACLU), opposed to a bill that would result in depriving Americans of their constitutional right to freedom of expression.
Moreover, these legitimate concerns are not the sole concern of “foreign” platforms. We remember the revelations of Ms. Haugen and the Facebook files which had highlighted the practices of the American platform and the awareness of their harmful effects on the mental health of adolescents.
Beware of these calls to the United States to ban foreign platforms.
These calls may be motivated by economic or political considerations. For example, India decreed a total ban on TikTok from 2020 – among 60 other applications proposed by China, in the name of national security. However, this measure amounted to reprisals in the context of serious border incidents between the two countries.
In Europe, the Personal Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Digital Services Act which came into force in November 2022 (DSA) apply to TikTok. The Chinese platform is a Very Large Platform within the meaning of the DSA and will have to report on moderation, the use of recommendation algorithms and the systemic risks posed by the use of its services. If the European rules are transgressed, TikTok will have to be held accountable and will have to be sanctioned (fines of up to 6% of global turnover and possibility of administrative suspension of the service).
Let’s be vigilant about compliance with the DSA by the Chinese platform and welcome the existence of European regulations, the application of which should allow us both to protect European Internet users and to preserve our democratic values.