FBI Director Chris Wray once again discussed concerns about the popularity and operation of TikTok in the United States.
During a speech at the University of Michigan, the first cop in the country regretted the opacity of TikTok’s practices, and especially the malignant uses that the Chinese government can make of them. He is not the first to worry about it, but his position as director of the federal police undoubtedly gives weight to his statements.
An opaque operation that could be exploited by the Chinese government
During his conference, Wray, underlines two major points of concern caused by the popularity of TikTok, the social network owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The first concerns the protection of the data of Americans who use the platform: they would, according to him, be freely accessible from Beijing. This real machine for collecting personal data (even from Internet users who do not use the application) could, still according to Wray, be used in the context of traditional espionage operations.
The other major concern of the FBI boss concerns the possible foreign interference that the application would allow. He argues that by controlling the algorithm, TikTok leaders have the ability to choose the content offered to users, a mechanism that could be used in particular to manipulate elections. The feasibility of such a process is no longer really to be demonstrated, at least since 2016, when Donald Trump’s campaign widely used the personal information of millions of Americans to offer them targeted content calling on them to vote for the Republican candidate.
TikTok in the sights of the American authorities for a while
The director of the FBI is not the first to worry about the place taken by a company controlled, according to him, by ” a government that does not share our values “. In early November, the Federal Communications Commission simply recommended banning the social network. Earlier still, in 2020, the American authorities had forced the platform to be bought by an American company to have the right to operate on its soil. Vanessa Pappas, chief operating officer of TikTok USA, testified before the Senate last September. She then claimed that the information of American users was protected and that the Chinese government did not have access to it. The same cannot be said of Europeans, as TikTok clearly expressed in its TOS.
While the concerns raised by Wray are legitimate, everything he blames for TikTok is also applicable to other social networks, the only difference being the origin of the company. As a reminder, several Twitter employees have been accused of spying for India or Saudi Arabia, Facebook was very likely used during the Brexit campaign, and this same social network has sprained to its own rules of moderation to support the current revolt movement in Iran.
Sources: PA, Time
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