Governments around the world are talking about banning Chinese company Bytedance’s Tiktok social video app for their employees over fears of spying by the Chinese government. But what does that mean for private users?
Various searches in the past have found security gaps and alleged connections to China. Tiktok denies that.
At the same time, Tiktok appears to be actively influencing what users see in the app – and what not. This is potentially dangerous.
More and more countries are examining whether the short video platform Tiktok should be banned on the service smartphones of government employees. Now the government in Washington has also threatened to ban Tiktok in the United States. President Biden’s government has asked the Chinese parent company Bytedance, which is behind Tiktok, to sell its shares in the short video app. Otherwise the ban threatens how the FAZ reported. For Tiktok, however, this is only the last option.
In the US Congress, in the White House and in Canada, the video app on company cell phones is now taboo. The app can also no longer be used on the smartphones of the EU Commission from mid-March. Since March 10, 2023, Tiktok has also been banned in Belgium.
At the same time, the number of users of the Kurz video platform continues to grow: in mid-2022, 1.7 billion people were actively using Tiktok worldwide. For comparison, Facebook had 2.6 billion users at the time, Instagram 1.2 billion, and Snapchat 549 million. Tiktok will probably have doubled its user numbers from one to two billion between 2021 and 2024. The social network from China is repeatedly criticized.
What is behind the Tiktok bans?
Politicians and IT security experts fear above all that China, under the leadership of dictator Xi Jinping, could use the app to spy on and manipulate users. There is no clear evidence for this. However, different research repeatedly provides indications that user data is being sent to China and that the platform’s algorithms are not working as Tiktok claims.
These fears are also relevant for private users of the app. We give you an overview of the most important observations of the past years:
What connections does Tiktok have to China?
The Chinese company Bytedance is behind Tiktok. The Chinese state’s ability to influence and control the country’s companies is already considered to be high. In the case of Bytedance, since April 2021 the Chinese government has owns one percent of the company shares.
In August 2021 also became knownthat a Chinese government official will occupy one of four seats on the company’s board of directors. According to reports from South China Morning Post he is said to have previously been primarily responsible for propaganda work. In 2020, research by Forbes also revealed that around 300 employees of the group had worked for the Chinese state apparatus before coming to Bytedance.
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Tiktok denies having ties to China. In October 2021, for example, a US manager of the group testified in a hearing before a US Senate economic subcommittee that the Bytedance company based in Beijing had “no relationship whatsoever with Tiktok”. The app itself does not exist in China. There Bytedance operates the Chinese counterpart Douyin. The Chinese government is notorious around the world for heavily censoring online services in its own country. The Chinese have no access to international media such as Instagram, YouTube or Tiktok.
Will data get to China via Tiktok?
In the summer of 2022 Buzzfeed US leaked audio recordings of more than 80 internal meetings at Tiktok, among other things, suggesting that employees in China had access to US data between at least September 2021 and January 2022. In a meeting, a manager is said to have referred to a Beijing engineer from Bytedance as a “master admin” who has “access to everything”.
However, according to Buzzfeed, the recordings also show that Tiktok is said to have already been talking about changes at this point in time to prevent certain “protected” data from flowing from the USA to China. According to Tiktok, data from users from the USA is currently being processed directly in the United States, with backup servers located in Singapore. Data from European Tiktok users is also currently stored in Singapore and the USA. In the future, however, they are to be stored in Europe. Data centers in Ireland and Norway are planned for this purpose. Significantly stricter data protection measures apply in Europe than in the USA or Singapore.
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In July 2022 the „Spiegel“ Results from analyzes by the American-Australian IT security company Internet 2.0. According to this, the Tiktok app repeatedly established connections to various countries around the world, including China, during the period of the investigation. Tiktok then announced that it was “clearly untrue that there is communication with China.” Rather, the analysts suspect “fundamental misunderstandings” about how mobile apps work. The mirror was not allowed to quote from the technical explanations that TikTok submitted.
Is Tiktok manipulating us?
What made Tiktok particularly successful was its start page, the so-called for-you-page. Behind it is a sophisticated algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to identify the interests of the respective users extremely quickly. The idea of this home page is to keep showing users brand new content. Unlike other platforms, Tiktok presents users there with less content from channels that they already follow. On the one hand, this makes the app particularly interesting, on the other hand, there is theoretically great potential for manipulation. Because Tiktok has often been criticized for having influenced the actually user-oriented algorithm.
In early 2023, a Forbes-Research known that Tiktok apparently pushes certain accounts in particular – so they complained about a lot of views. The process became known under the name “heating”. A former Tiktok manager confirmed this research and said to “SWR3” that videos of prominent people in particular were being pushed in a targeted manner. Heating apparently works for many Tiktok employees simply by pressing a button with approval from superiors. However, according to the former employee, via a “at least two-stage approval loop”. The pushed accounts were not informed about this. Theoretically, it would also be possible for Tiktok to particularly promote content from large companies or certain political content. This is hardly controllable from the outside.
Tiktok itself did not deny the heating function when asked by SWR3. The statement simply said: “We are promoting the visibility of some videos to diversify the range of content and to introduce celebrities and emerging artists to the Tiktok community.”
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Does Tiktok block certain content?
At the same time, there have also been cases in the past in which Tiktok is said to have hidden certain content. In October 2022, NDR, WDR and Tagesschau published research accusing Tiktok of using word filters. With the help of test accounts, the journalists tested a total of 70 words and word combinations in September. More than 20 of them were filtered out, as “tagesschau.de” reports. Including words like “Nazi”, “slaves”, “gas”, “LGBTQ” and “gay”. If comments contained at least one of these words, they were blocked.
The authors themselves do not find out that their comment was not published at all. According to the research team, the article will continue to be displayed to you. Tiktok explained the alleged censorship with the use of artificial intelligence when moderating posts that try to recognize hate comments and hide them accordingly. Because the journalists created new accounts for the research, the AI also suspected an unnatural activity – i.e. trolls – behind the many comments. Tiktok announced that it wants to improve the system.
But there have also been allegations that Tiktok is withholding content from users. 2020 released that Australian Strategic Policy Institute For example, a report accusing Tiktok of concealing the oppression of the Uyghurs in China on the platform. At the time, the researchers found only one of the top 20 videos on the subject criticizing the Chinese government. Instead, Tiktok conveys a version more convenient for the Chinese Communist Party, “full of smiling and dancing Uyghurs,” the report said.
In this case, too, Tiktok reacted to the criticism and made adjustments. Shortly thereafter, significantly more videos critical of the situation in Xinjiang appeared.
So how dangerous is Tiktok?
Tiktok repeatedly emphasizes that it does not give any data to China and is not under the influence of the Chinese government. The reports from the past at least show that there are apparently always security gaps. The question is also whether Tiktok can prevent the parent company Bytedance from influencing the app at all.
The renowned US security expert Bruce Schneier therefore comes to a clear verdict. He told the DPA there was no doubt that Tiktok and Bytedance were shady. “They work, like most big companies in China, on behalf of the Chinese government. They collect an enormous amount of information about their users.”
However, Schneier also says that other social networks such as Instagram or Facebook are no better. Although these are not influenced by a communist dictatorship, as could presumably be the case with Tiktok, data is not secure there either, according to Sneier. “Your data is being bought and sold by data brokers you’ve never heard of and who have few scruples about where the data ends up.”
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