TikTok will have, for a few days, made a media tour of the world that its Chinese parent company ByteDance would have done well without. Now controversial, this application of short and innocent dance videos turns out to be, at the end of the day, potentially a platform that could be qualified as a tool of espionage or at the very least of influence. A digital Trojan horse, worthy of the XXIe century.
Is it really possible? Is it that TikTokwhich our children use (very) many hours a week, can actually be a tool of remote manipulation by a totalitarian Chinese government that does not necessarily seek the good of the world population, but rather to better understand it for economic purposes. and policies?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes. And to those who still doubt it, well know that TikTok does not exist in China. TikTok is an application specifically created to establish itself internationally. An economic aberration if we only look at the significant cost of such a project, since TikTok is just a copy-paste of an identical application, born a year earlier, and used by hundreds of millions of Chinese, called Douyin. Why then recreate the existing to invade the world? No economically sensible company would embark on such a project! Unless…
Unless your original application (in this case Douyin) was subject to censorship imposed by the People’s Republic of China. And it is indeed the case. No application in China can, for example, try to raise the population against the government in place, cannot incite discrimination, or can not spread disinformation.
Creating TikTok for its international expansion, ByteDance (in which the Chinese government is a shareholder, this is important in the equation), thus circumvents Chinese internet censorship and can therefore, logically, misinform, discriminate or even overthrow .
Most importantly, it can access data on your devices, upon request from the Chinese government, without further legal action (unlike in the United States or Canada or European Union countries). Data which taken alone are not interesting (knowing which school your child goes to is not so strategic), but which taken collectively give societal indications on our functioning in the West.
If upon realizing this you start to have a few cold sweats on your back, don’t read what’s to come…
Technological dominance
China, you will understand by now, is technologically capable of infiltrating our lives, our democracies (not only China, but with a totalitarian regime, this cannot be ignored). But the worst is potentially yet to come. You should know that China, according to the latest research from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), has laid the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading superpower in science and technology, by establishing a (sometimes astonishing) lead in research with high impact, and this, in the majority of the critical and emerging technological fields.
China’s global lead extends to 37 of the 44 technologies ASPI is currently tracking, covering a range of crucial technology areas like defence, space, robotics, energy, environment, biotechnology , artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key areas of quantum technology (that technology which, in the future, could very well replace the computing we all know).
The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for certain technologies, the top 10 global research institutes are based in China and collectively generate nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the United States). ).
Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) among many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. The ASPI report also finds that China’s efforts are bolstered by importing talent and knowledge: one-fifth (20%) of its high-impact papers are written by researchers with postgraduate training. in a country of the Five Eyes, literal translation of the “Five Eyes” which designates the alliance of the intelligence services of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Within the “Five Eyes” for Canada are the Chief of Defense Intelligence, Communications Security Establishment Canada and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
It should be understood that China’s advance is the product of deliberate design and long-term political planning, as President Xi Jinping and his predecessors have repeatedly emphasized. It could therefore be relevant to set up in our Western countries a form of regulation which would make it possible to filter, according to certain criteria and before installation in our cellphones, applications from countries which do not share our vision of society. Filters like the food industry regulating what ends up on your plates so as not to create health issues, because we certainly wouldn’t want to poison our children. Filters that will protect us collectively, that will protect our democracies, and that will protect our children’s brains and our adults’ brains.
SO, TikTok, an application to be wary of? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.