TikTok: from economic boom to judicial doom?

After several prosperous years in terms of growth, TikTok appears to be caught up by legislation all around the globe following a growing number of claims regarding the risks posed by the platform for its users, and for the countries’ national security. In a 180 pages report released on July 6th, the French Senate urges the State to ban the social platform unless TikTok provides enough guarantees in terms of data protection, transparency, and independence regarding Beijing.The senators emphasized “the strong contradiction between TikTok’s transparency claims and the reality of a deliberate opacity”. On April 14th, Montana voted to ban TikTok’s application and website within the borders of the state, with effect on January 1st, 2024. If enforcing this ban raises several questions, both legally and technically, this new decision from a US authority highlights how the pressure over Bytedance and TikTok has increased in recent years, especially in Western Countries. All these legal actions contrast with the outrageous economic wealth of the Chinese app around the globe and the outstanding growth the company has been experiencing since 2020, making it a singular player in the social media landscape. A spectacular expansion since COVID-19 Since the end of 2019, Tiktok has almost tripled its user base, hitting the one billion users mark in 2021, before the ban of the platform in India, making it one of the fastest growth ever experienced in the social media landscape. Contrary to the expansion route followed by most of the players in the market, TikTok’s adoption occurred in most of the different regions of the globe at once, in North and South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Hence, as of today, the leading countries in terms of monthly active users (MAUs) are the USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, Mexico, Russia, the UK, and Turkiye.   If the significant increase in revenues witnessed in 2021 and 2022 can be partly attributed to the straight increase in users, numerous other factors have contributed to driving TikTok’s revenues higher. TikTok allows advertisers to reach younger audiences who are nowadays out of the scope of traditional media, leading to higher CPMs. According to various surveys conducted in the UK and in the US, a quarter of TikTok’s active users are younger than 19, and almost half the user base is younger than 29. Contrary to most algorithms developed by its competitors, Tiktok’s recommendation system does not focus on providing content from creators that are already part of the user’s ecosystem, but instead provides a wider diversity of unknown creators. Although this choice could have been risky, it finally led to a strong increase in time spent on the platform. Hence, according to polls conducted in the US, the average time...