These applications present "risks in terms of cybersecurity and data protection of public officials and administration," concluded the entourage of the Minister of Public Service Stanislas Guerini at the end of an analysis conducted by the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (Anssi) and the Interministerial Directorate of Digital (Dinum).

Among the applications now banned is "the triptych applications of games like Candy Crush, streaming like Netflix and recreational like TikTok," says the entourage of Stanislas Guerini.

Twitter, whose content moderation policy has been debated since its acquisition by Elon Musk, is also blacklisted, he said.

However, the government has not yet drawn up a precise list of banned applications, which would apply to all ministries.

As a matter of principle, it is therefore all applications that can be considered recreational that will be banned. Only a few individual exemptions may be granted for institutional communication purposes, for example, according to the ministry.

The ban, notified to the various ministries through a "binding" instruction according to the government, comes into force immediately, and does not concern the personal phones of state officials.

In the event of a violation of this new rule, no unified system of sanctions is foreseen at this stage. Possible measures may be decided "at the managerial level" of each ministry, according to the services of Stanislas Guerini.

The White House, the European Commission, the Canadian and British governments, among others, but also some other organizations have recently banned their officials from using TikTok on their work phones.

More than one billion users

On Thursday, the boss of the application Shou Zi Chew was strangled for several hours by members of the US Congress, Washington considering a total ban of TikTok in the country.

At the center of the fears is a 2017 Chinese law that requires local companies to hand over personal data that would be a matter of national security at the request of the authorities.

The Chinese government "has never requested and will not ask any company or individual to collect or hand over data from abroad in a way that would violate local laws," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Friday.

TikTok has more than one billion active users worldwide, including 125 million in the European Union.

The ban unsheathed Friday by Paris has a broader spectrum than those decided in other Western countries because it targets all recreational applications rather than the only TikTok network.

"These applications were not designed to be deployed on professional networks," justifies the Ministry of Public Service.

The measures announced in recent days by the Netherlands or Norway are less restrictive: both countries have simply advised their officials against the use of TikTok.

The scope of restrictive measures varies greatly from one State to another, several having chosen to prohibit the application to political personnel (deputies, ministers) rather than civil servants.

Apart from concerns about data security, TikTok is also criticized for the opacity of its algorithm and regularly accused of hosting videos of misinformation, dangerous challenges and images with sexual overtones.

AFP, among more than a dozen fact-checking organizations, is paid by TikTok in several countries in Asia and Oceania, Europe, the Middle East and Spanish-speaking Latin America to verify videos that potentially contain false information. They are removed by TikTok if AFP teams demonstrate that the information conveyed is false

© 2023 AFP