“Downloading TikTok is like downloading a Chinese spy on your cell phone,” warned Mark Thiessen, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute and former press secretary to former US President George W. Bush, a few days ago via the Washington Post. More and more governments and institutions seem to share his view. Within two months, in February and March, the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament, the governments of Britain, France, of Belgium, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as the Danish Ministry of Defence. The US federal government had already moved forward with the same ban since last December, the same has been announced or done by at least 32 of the 50 US states, while Montana in particular passed a bill that could make it, next January, the first state to it wipes out TikTok from all mobile phones. Perhaps, of course, the developments will catch up with her (please also read the analysis entitled “Τik-Tok: The New Victim of USA-China Trade War” & “When Social Media “bite” the national defense and breach information systems“).
The dilemma
In early March, Joe Biden’s administration demanded that ByteDance, the Chinese company that created the controversial platform for creating and sharing short videos in 2017, sell its stake in TikTok, threatening to ban its use in all countries if it did not. USA. With this ultimatum, he essentially revived the order that Donald Trump had signed in August 2020: his Democratic successor in the White House had canceled it in June 2021, before recently changing his mind. The whole issue was summed up nicely, in the French newspaper “Le Monde”, by Isabelle Feng, lawyer and researcher at the Asia Center in Paris as well as at the Pelerman Center for the Philosophy of Law, at the Free University of Brussels: “So is TikTok a Trojan Beijing horse for the abusive collection of personal data and a threat to national security? Or is he a scapegoat for the Sino-American conflict, a scapegoat for Washington’s anti-China paranoia?”
In early March, Joe Biden’s administration demanded that ByteDance, the Chinese company that created the controversial platform for creating and sharing short videos in 2017, sell its stake in TikTok, threatening to ban its use in all countries if it did not. USA. With this ultimatum, he essentially revived the order that Donald Trump had signed in August 2020: his Democratic successor in the White House had canceled it in June 2021, before recently changing his mind. The whole issue was summed up nicely, in the French newspaper “Le Monde”, by Isabelle Feng, lawyer and researcher at the Asia Center in Paris as well as at the Pelerman Center for the Philosophy of Law, at the Free University of Brussels: “So is TikTok a Trojan Beijing horse for the abusive collection of personal data and a threat to national security? Or is he a scapegoat for the Sino-American conflict, a scapegoat for Washington’s anti-China paranoia?”
The episodes
She herself seems to lean toward the former, pointing out the “shadow of the Chinese Communist Party” behind the app that officially has more than a billion monthly active users. TikTok’s real sin, he writes, lies in a change of management, the latest episode of which has certainly caught the attention of the governments of many Western countries. To take it, schematically, from the beginning: on April 30, 2021, three state-owned Chinese companies, among them the Cyberspace Administration of China, the powerful Internet regulator, acquire 1% of ByteDance Limited, for a ridiculous amount , just two million yuan (€264,000), and secure one of its three board seats, with veto power. In it, Wu Shugang, a KKK operative known for his 2012 proclamation on Weibo, China’s Twitter, drops like a parachute: “May the devil take human rights and freedom!”
Episode two: on May 20, 2021, Zhang Yiming, the 38-year-old founder of ByteDance, resigns as CEO, president and managing director: as of early 2022, he lives in Singapore.
Episode three: on January 18th, this same Zhang Yiming transfers his entire stake, 98.81%, in ByteDance to a shadow company, Xiamen Xingchen Qidian Technology (XXQT), which had been founded just twenty days earlier. Chinese media are wondering how a little mouse with a social capital of one million yuan (130,000 euros) managed to swallow a planetary giant worth close to 200 billion dollars (183 billion euros). But no one dares to break the omerta that surrounds the two shareholders of XXQT: no information about them appears officially, beyond their names. We only know that they own 50% of the mysterious company founded in Xiamen – a city of which Chinese President Xi Jinping was vice mayor between 1985 – 1988 before he began his meteoric rise.
Chinese law
Combine all of this with a 2017 Chinese law that compels local businesses to hand over national security personal data to authorities upon request, and you can see why Brendan Carr, the most senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, recently testified that the TikTok “acts as a sophisticated surveillance tool” that allows Beijing to collect the search and browsing histories, typing patterns, text messages, unsent draft messages, photos, videos, location data, fingerprints and audio fingerprints of millions of Americans. And why Mark Thiessen expresses, through the “Washington Post”, the fear that TikTok will one day help Beijing find a new (or many…) Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old American aviator who served in the 102nd Air Force Intelligence Wing Massachusetts National Guard, and was recently arrested on charges of leaking hundreds of classified Pentagon documents online. Some low-ranking employee, that is, with access to the information he wants. After all, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 67% of American teenagers have TikTok installed on their phones. Globally, 41% of its users are between 16-24 years old, members of Generation Z, the generation Z, the one that is slowly getting into things.
Relationship mapping
China, Thiessen warns, could one day use the data it collects from TikTok – and according to the head of Ireland’s National Cyber Security Centre, Richard Brown, the platform is “probably at the high end in terms of volume of user data it collects’ – to map personal and professional relationships, identify persons of interest, and target them for information. It could also use that access not just for intelligence gathering or commercial espionage purposes, but to potentially gain access to the computer networks that control critical US infrastructure – and target them, in the event of a conflict. “The issue here,” said Richard Brown, suggesting that the Irish government delete TikTok from official phones, “isn’t what we know is happening. It’s that we can’t rule it out.”
In Ireland
TikTok runs several of its European operations from Dublin. In an effort to reassure, he announced last month that he would open a second data center in Ireland, and limit the transfer of data outside the EU. He also promised Washington that by the end of the year all information relating to the 150 million US users would be they are only managed by servers located in the USA. The big question is: How much trust (should we) have in Beijing?
