Eric Garandeau, director of public affairs for TikTok in France since August 2020, considers himself served by the news. “I signed my contract the day [le président américain] Donald Trump tried to ban the platform in the United Stateshe explains. So I was recruited at a complicated time. » Since then, the application of Chinese origin with a billion users on the planet has been the subject of criticism every day and suffered cascading setbacks everywhere.
Accused of being a spy tool for Beijing and a vehicle for disseminating false information, TikTok was fined 5 million euros, because users cannot refuse cookies (computer tracers). The platform was also condemned in the United Kingdom, at the beginning of April, for illegal use of data related to children.
Two investigations are ongoing at the Irish Data Protection Commission, and the app is already blocked on the phones of civil servants in scores of countries. In France, a commission of inquiry started its work in mid-March in the Senate. Its rapporteur, Claude Malhuret, will verify whether “TikTok is not a potential instrument of disinformation or manipulation for the benefit of undemocratic regimes, and that its use is safe with regard to the necessary data protection”. Eric Garandeau, who has already met several of the members of the commission, has not yet seen his rapporteur, nor his president, Mickaël Vallet.
His whole career in the sector
The TikTok influence agent in France, former enarque (Valmy promotion, 1998), finance inspector, has spent his entire career in culture. Pianist, Eric Garandeau also created with David Grimal, in 2003, in Paris, a symphony orchestra, Les Dissonances, whose particularity consists in playing without a conductor. This is not the case at TikTok, where everything is led by the wand. The interview with Mr. Garandeau to produce this portrait, initially refused, could only take place in the presence of the communications director.
Born in Angers on March 6, 1973, this eldest son of a biology professor and a dentist father started out as a project manager at France Télévisions before becoming, in 2002, music, tax and sponsorship adviser to the Minister of the Jean-Jacques Aillagon culture. After a stint in the financial and legal direction of the National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC), Eric Garandeau was appointed cultural adviser to the President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, in May 2007, a position he held until to December 2010. He then supervised the major projects of the Center Pompidou-Metz, the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the MuCEM (Marseille).
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