We expected a scathing report, we were not disappointed. As expected, the Senate Committee of Inquiry on TikTok ended its work by firing red balls against the popular Chinese social video network. The two senators in charge, President Mickaël Vallet and rapporteur Claude Malhuret, recommend suspending the application to the 22 million French users if serious changes are not made by his teams.
The two elected officials thus call on Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, to clarify its statutes and its shareholding, to comply with the European Digital Services Act regulation, to put in place more controls and finally to better fight against disinformation. . Criticisms which come a few months after other setbacks for the social network, banned from the phones of agents of the European Commission, the European Parliament and French officials for reasons of cybersecurity and protection of personal data.
Ineffective fight against misinformation
Beyond cybersecurity issues – the report simply calls for extending the ban on the application to the personnel of operators of vital importance who must play an important role in the event of a crisis -, the two elected officials point to a struggle of the social network against “ineffective” disinformation. While it would only take 40 minutes on the app to be exposed to false content on current topics, only a fraction of the videos have been removed from the social network for this reason.
The application is finally, they recall, much less efficient than other social networks in identifying disinformation content, an automated task which is failing. Last fall, Global Witness pointed to the poor results of TikTok, which had approved 90% of advertisements containing false and misleading electoral information created by the NGO.
600 French-speaking moderators
“TikTok maintains the vagueness on the human resources dedicated to the fight against false information”, further believe the senators, therefore following in the footsteps of Arcom, which had pinned the social network last fall on its opacity. “Only the figure for Trust and Safety’s global workforce (40,000) is communicated, including all the teams dedicated to content security”, add the elected officials, who report that there would be more than 600 French-speaking moderators.
The moderation teams of the Chinese version of the application know how to be very vigilant when it comes to reducing the visibility of the incidents of Tiananmen Square, the independence of Tibet or the religious group Falun Gong, had revealed there is four years the British daily newspaper The Guardian. Same worrying reactivity last year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine: TikTok then “suddenly” banned all international content for Russian users. “This event raises fears that, in critical moments, the platform could be used for massive disinformation purposes unfavorable to China’s ‘strategic competitors'”, conclude the senators.