Two Years After Trump’s Threats, Silicon Valley Tries to Drive China’s TikTok Out of America.
Worried about the success of TikTok, Meta leads an anti-TikTok campaign full of bad faith and hypocrisy.
What if TikTok was Beijing's false nose? What if the app was capturing Americans' data on behalf of China? What if its powerful content recommendation algorithm allowed the Chinese Communist Party to manipulate American youth? Two years after Donald Trump's failed attempt to force China's ByteDance to sell TikTok, the hostile narrative toward the popular video service is back in full force in the United States.
“Imagine if we were in the middle of the Cold War and the Soviet Union was in a position to influence the Western bloc's television programming. That's the situation we're in,” says Tristan Harris, founder of the NGO Center for Humane Technology, in his podcast.
“Are we comfortable with the idea that a foreign organization can control what our children see? TikTok should be banned, period,” proclaimed marketing professor Scott Galloway, a prolix commentator on the tech industry, on HBO in mid-September 2022.
The CEO of media company Axel Springer also called in early September 2022 for a ban on TikTok “in all democracies.”
“We will eventually feel the effects of our dependence on this service, and they won't just be economic. The political consequences are going to be immense,” warned Mathias Döpfner, at the Code Conference, a gathering of Silicon Valley bosses where the word TikTok was on everyone's lips. A week later, Vanessa Papas, director of operations, was questioned by a Senate committee on the links between the company and the Beijing regime.
“Are any employees of TikTok or ByteDance members of the Chinese Communist Party,” Republican Senator Josh Hawley asked her. “Your company has a lot to hide. You are a walking security nightmare and I am concerned for all Americans who use your service.”
1 billion users for TikTok
The Chinese application, with more than 1 billion users worldwide, has the powers of America against it. It is difficult to disentangle what is a legitimate question about the dangers of the application from a more pragmatic economic protectionism.
If fears about TikTok are suddenly awakened, it is also because this service has turned the historical power of American social networks upside down...
The application is continuously number one in downloads in the United States and Europe since 2021. Three-quarters of American teenagers use it, and half of them connect several times a day. And advertisers are likely to allocate their marketing budgets to TikTok over Meta or YouTube.
“Competition can come from anywhere. You know, three years ago, no one was talking about TikTok,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged at the Code Conference. Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, denounced unfair competition:
“No one in the U.S. anticipated all the money ByteDance was going to invest in the U.S. and European markets, because it was simply inconceivable. No startup can afford to spend billions of dollars to acquire users.”
This gigantic mass of behavioral data captured by TikTok allowed its artificial intelligence to know which videos to put in front of which user's eyes to make him come back day after day. A decisive competitive advantage, but artificially acquired in the eyes of Snapchat. The efforts undertaken for two years by Meta and YouTube to copy TikTok's main feature - very short videos recommended by a personalized algorithm - have not succeeded in slowing down its crazy growth.
Anxious about the success of this insolent rival, Meta does not hesitate to use some very unfair methods against it. In March 2022, the Washington Post revealed that Mark Zuckerberg's group was trying to turn public opinion, and ultimately the political class, against TikTok. To do this, it paid the company Targeted Victory which, in return, spread rumors that dangerous challenges, such as “Slap your teacher” or “Vandalize your school,” would multiply on TikTok - which was false.
Another method was to publish letters from so-called concerned parents in the local press. “We need to get the message out that TikTok is the real threat as a foreign app that captures kids' data,” wrote the director of Targeted Victory in an email obtained by the Washington Post. This argument, echoed by many American elected officials, is seen as highly hypocritical by some observers.
“The panic over TikTok in a country that doesn't give a damn about consumer data protection or the actions of the data broker industry is laughable,” freelance journalist Karl Bode quipped. “The Chinese government can already get all the data it wants by buying it from these intermediaries because our laws are catastrophic.”
Another, far less questionable line of reasoning has recently emerged in America.
“Facebook, Google, and Amazon are not allowed to operate in China. So why are we letting Chinese companies play such a dominant role in our economies,” argues Mathias Dopfner. Chinese protectionism must be answered by Western protectionism. The eviction of TikTok from the American market would do the business of Silicon Valley. But would the Chinese application be the innocent victim of an orchestrated cabal? Nothing is less sure.
TikTok has always claimed that American users' data was not transiting through China. An investigation by BuzzFeed, published in June 2022, challenged this assertion. The media obtained recordings of 80 meetings in the company's American offices. Fourteen times, the conversations suggest that China-based engineers accessed the data. This does not mean that they were passed on to the Chinese authorities. But Beijing's takeover of its tech industry is such that doubt cannot be excluded.
Strategic decisions made in China
TikTok later explained that these Chinese engineers did access data “after authorization protocols overseen by their U.S. teams and subject to robust cybersecurity controls.” This work is related to the strategic “Project Texas,” a legacy of the high tensions of 2020 with the Trump presidency. All data captured in the U.S. is now exclusively stored on servers managed by U.S.-based Oracle and hosted in the country.
All of TikTok's technologies that were created in China, including the famous recommendation algorithm, will then be “cloned” to operate in a closed circuit in the United States and be accessible only to an American technical team. But will this team be independent of its parent company?
An investigation by the New York Times, published in mid-September 2022, shows that ByteDance already has a short leash on TikTok's CEO, the Singaporean Shou Zi Chew: while the latter manages the finances, all strategic decisions about the application continue to be made in China. Including the design of its formidable algorithm.
Close to being sold to Oracle and Walmart under the Trump era, TikTok continues to negotiate behind the scenes with the Committee on Foreign Investments to put an end to suspicions that are never really extinguished. “Project Texas” should be the culmination of those discussions. But their slowness since Joe Biden took office has exasperated his opponents. A frustration that keeps growing these last weeks.
The TikTok soap opera seems to be well on its way to a new season.
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