More and more governments are blocking it Chinese TikTok app. on official mobiles. Why has the international effervescence reached such proportions? At first glance, TikTok is a harmless and banal social media app, as reported by german wave. Anyone who is invited to use this particular social network gets an endless stream of fun music videos, dance videos, cooking recipes, and beauty tips. As in the case with Instagram, Twitter And facebook, the algorithm evaluates each user’s use of the social environment each time to determine the content that is most likely to interest them. However, there is growing concern for China’s TikTok app about how this data is being used and how the app itself might misuse it to influence or spy on users. A few days ago, the European Commission announced that its service providers must remove the app from their mobile devices no later than March 15th. The European Parliament also introduced a similar ban, and the US and Canadian governments followed suit. The popular app, which has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, is used by more than a billion people around the world.

TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which denies allegations that the Chinese state may have had access to the app. “We have not received a single request for data from the Chinese government since transparency reports began in 2019,” a spokesman for the company told the UK Guardian newspaper in November. Content that is displayed, as well as what is not displayed when using the application, is another subject of strong criticism. The deleted video in 2019 caused an uproar. The video showed a 17-year-old girl initially giving makeup advice but later denouncing Beijing’s oppression of the Muslim Uyghur minority living in Xinjiang province. An investigation by German broadcaster ARD in March 2022 revealed that TikTok used filters in Germany that blocked content with certain keywords such as “LGBTQ”, “sex”, “Nazism” and the name of Chinese tennis player Peng Shui, who accused China’s former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli sexual abuse. The app promised a “thorough investigation” following the post.

Among other things, the re-evaluation of the application in Europe and North America was carried out as a response to the new data protection guidance presented in November by the company itself. The irony is that he was supposed to make more transparent the processing of European users’ data, which is stored on servers in the US and Singapore. In fact, “certain employees” should be allowed to access this data in many other countries, including China, the company claims. The fact that TikTok has openly revealed that European user data is being transferred to China has finally sparked outrage in the West.