First it was the United States and the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, and now Canada has joined.
Its officials will no longer be able to use TikTok on their official devices due to misgivings about the popular Chinese video app among Western governments.
Taiwan also does not allow its officials to use it, and India completely banned the app in the country in 2020, after a geopolitical dispute with China.
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran also censor the app, but because they consider that it contradicts their social values.
why are they suspicious
TikTok is a video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd. that is hugely popular, especially among younger users.
The application has experienced explosive growth in recent years, becoming the first app that is not owned by Meta (owner of Facebook or Instagram) to reach 3 billion global downloads, according to the analysis company Sensor Tower Data.
However, the firm has been accused of collecting data from its users and handing it over to the Chinese government.
According to a cybersecurity study published in July 2022 by Internet 2.0, an Australian company, the app carries out “excessive data collection.” Its researchers studied the source code of the application and ensured that it collected data such as the location of users, which terminal they were using and what other applications were on the device.
For its critics, TikTok is a kind of “Trojan horse” that, although it seems harmless, could become a powerful weapon during times of conflict.
What measures have been taken
The Canadian government has prohibited its employees from using it since Tuesday as it ensures that the application presents “an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”
The Canadian regulator is investigating what TikTok does with user data, particularly whether the company obtains “valid and meaningful” consent when it collects personal information.
“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to phone content,” Mona Fortier, chairwoman of the Treasury Board of Canada, which oversees government spending, said in a statement.
Although “the risks of using the application are clear,” the official assured that at the moment they have no evidence that government information had been compromised.
In Brussels, EU spokeswoman Sonya Gospodinova assured that, in the case of the European Commission, the measure aims to “protect the Commission against cybersecurity threats and actions that can be exploited for cyberattacks against the corporate environment” from the same.
The ban in the EU, which will take effect on March 15, also affects phones or personal devices that have official applications installed, such as the Commission’s email or messaging programs such as Skype for Business.
At the end of the year, the US federal government banned its officials from using TikTok, and has now given other government agencies 30 days to remove the app from their systems. Several American universities have done the same.
Back in 2020, the administration of then-President Donald Trump tried to ban the app nationwide. However, due to numerous legal challenges, this debate fizzled out and fizzled out in 2021, when incumbent President Joe Biden struck down Trump’s proposal.
What TikTok Says
Tik Tok insists that it does not operate differently from other social networks.
Although the Internet 2.0 study is often cited, Citizen Lab conducted another similar test that concluded that “compared to other popular social media platforms, TikTok collects the same type of data to track user behavior.”
A similar conclusion was reached by the Georgia Institute of Technology, which noted in January that “the key issue here is that other social networking sites and mobile apps are doing the same thing.”
The company also ensures that the Chinese government does not have access to user data, and that the Chinese version of the application is different from the one used in the rest of the world.
However, last December ByteDance admitted that several of its workers in Beijing had accessed the data of at least two American journalists and a “small number” of others, to track their locations and see if they were meeting with TikTok employees. who they suspected were leaking information about the company to the media.
According to the company, these workers who accessed the data were laid off in December.
TikTok is also in talks with the US government to store all of its user data in the US instead of China. In addition, it ensures that since last summer, all US data has been directed through servers based in the American country.
Is there censorship on TikTok?
In November 2022, the director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assured that “the Chinese government could (…) control the recommendations of the algorithm, which could be used for influence operations.”
In other words, Beijing could try to manipulate TikTok users through the publications that the application recommends.
Adding to these concerns is the fact that TikTok’s sister app Douyin, which is only available in China, is heavily censored and is apparently designed to encourage healthy and educational material to go viral.
Citizen Lab researchers conducted a comparison between TikTok and Douyin and concluded that TikTok does not employ the same political censorship.
“The platform does not impose obvious post-censorship,” the researchers said.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology they found no great traces of censorship either. Its analysts searched for topics like Taiwanese independence or jokes about Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, and concluded that “videos in all of these categories can be easily found on TikTok. Many are popular and widely shared.”
In China, all social media is heavily censored, with an army of police removing content critical of the government or deemed likely to cause political unrest.
When TikTok began to take off, there were some high-profile cases of censorship, such as when a US user’s account was suspended for talking about Beijing’s treatment of Xinjiang Muslims. Following the fierce public response, TikTok apologized and reinstated his account.
Since then there have been few instances of censorship, aside from a few controversial moderation decisions, the likes of which all platforms have to deal with.
What the Chinese government says
For Beijing, the US – and, therefore, other Western governments – abuses its state power to repress foreign companies.
“We strongly oppose these wrong actions,” spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a press conference on Tuesday. “The US government must uphold the principles of a market economy and fair competition, stop repressing business, and provide an open, fair, and non-discriminatory environment for foreign companies in the US.”
“How insecure of itself a global superpower like the United States must be to fear the favorite app of young people in this way,” he added.
However, as Joe Tidy, a BBC cybersecurity reporter, observes, the alleged risks, even theoretical, are not reciprocal: “China doesn’t have to worry about US apps because their access for Chinese citizens was blocked many years ago. ”.
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