NoIn recent weeks, it has been in the crosshairs of several countries, in the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, who want to limit its influence.
The French news agency (AFP) made a review of the controversies in which this network has been involved in recent years.
Under pressure
TikTok was first banned in India in 2020 after deadly clashes on the country’s border with China.
That same year, the application was also threatened with a ban in the United States, when Donald Trump was president, who accused it of spying for China.
Following an article on the BuzzFeed website, the social network admitted that China-based officials had had access to US user data, but refused to have it passed on to the Chinese Communist Party.
In an attempt to reassure users, the company has promised North Americans and Europeans that it will store data in its territory, through local partners.
But the US government and the European Commission, as early as 2023, banned the use of TikTok on their employees’ work devices.
Washington is now pushing for a broader ban, echoing a threat by Donald Trump in 2020.
Despite all these measures, nothing has stopped TikTok’s recent rise.
billion users
The platform now has over a billion active users worldwide, including 125 million in the European Union.
It is the sixth most popular social platform, according to the latest report by We Are Social, published in January. It is also the fastest growing platform, especially among younger users.
Above all, TikTok surpasses all its competitors in its attractiveness. In 2023, Android users used it for an average of 23 hours and 28 minutes per month.
Youtube or Meta (Facebook, Instagram) have tried to imitate its short video format, in continuous repetition, without much success so far.
an opaque algorithm
TikTok has been able to attract many ‘influencers’ (influencers) thanks to the video editing possibilities, the filters and the power of the algorithm. These ‘tiktokers’ — the best known of which are Khaby Lame, Charli d’Amelio and Bella Poarch — managed to attract many brands to their accounts.
But TikTok’s algorithm remains completely opaque.
In January, Forbes magazine revealed that employees of the TikTok application and Bytedance (the parent company) regularly used a button to increase the number of views of certain content.
According to TikTok, which recently announced a feature to explain why one video is proposed over another, manual promotion only concerns a small part of recommendations.
misinformation
The application, like other social networks, faces the challenge of content moderation. And it is regularly accused of hosting numerous disinformation videos, dangerous challenges and images with sexual connotations, despite banning nudity.
Finally, the NewsGuard tool, which assesses the credibility of news, concluded in September 2022 that 20% of the videos circulating on TikTok about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, school shootings in the US and vaccines for covid-19 were fake or misleading.
The AFP, which does fact-checking, is paid by TikTok in several countries in Asia and Oceania, Europe, the Middle East and Spanish-speaking Latin America to check videos that potentially contain false information. These videos are taken down by TikTok if the AFP teams prove the information false.
Read Also: US investigates TikTok for spying on US journalists
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