Source: Solen Feyissa / Unsplash
Last week, TikTok’s CEO, had a hearing in the US House of Representatives and it not went well. My ideas on this topic:
1/ Tiktok (Bytedance) has the merit of moving most of the Social Media attention from text and images to video. Also, moving our attention from our network of friends and family to the entire world, thanks to the algorithms.
2/ All non-Chinese Social Media apps are banned in China. Why shouldn’t the rest of the world do the same?
3/ The app has so many tracking options that is posing a security issue (hence this hearing)
4/ Nobody can control what the algorithm shows, not even Oracle
5/ Most US citizens take news from TikTok. Imagine the power to change the information narrative: from Taiwan to 5G.
6/ All tech Chinese companies have a board member from the Communist Party, which overrules the power of any private entity. We should not be naive about this and all the implications. Some of the CEOs wanted to prove the opposite, and now they are in prison (most of them), dead (a few), or in exile (hello, Jack Ma!)
