• TikTok One step closer to its total ban in the US

  • 2023 Big Tech prepare for the Big Crash

The Chinese social network TikTok is willing to allow part of its algorithms to be examined by private US companies, which in turn would transmit that information to the Government of Washington in the event that they

detect practices or systems contrary

to US law.

The offer comes after it was made public that TikTok had illegally accessed the accounts they had on the social network of two journalists whose names have not been identified, although the media they work for: the 'BuzzFeed' website and the newspaper 'Financial Times'.

Workers at TikTok - owned by the $220 billion

Chinese company ByteDance

- broke into the accounts of whistleblowers looking for the source of leaks about the company published in their respective outlets.

That scandal is not the first to affect TikTok.

In 2020, for example, and despite the fact that videos about the United States elections

reached a massive audience

-two billion views, according to ByteDance itself-, the social network altered its own algorithm so that it reduced the prominence of the videos. of political content, according to the newspaper 'The Wall Street Journal'.

Although the company has attributed the change to an internal decision, it is well known that the Beijing government prefers to avoid electoral issues in all countries, lest the

1.4 billion people who live in China think of asking for something similar

in his country.

With ByteDance's proposal, the algorithm on which the recommendations are based

would be examined by Oracle

and other companies, which should detect whether it has been manipulated by the Chinese government or another entity outside of TikTok.

That algorithm is one of the keys to TikTok's success.

While most social networks recommend content from people who are part of the user's social circle -family, friends, co-workers, etc.-, TikTok promotes content based on what its own systems consider to be of interest to each person from the audience,

regardless of their social circle.

The offer seems to obey the strategy of

ByteDance

, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to diversify the interlocutors with which it has been negotiating its future in the US.

To date, ByteDance's main counterpart has been the Joe Biden government.

The proposal that is being negotiated is the creation by TikTok of an independent legal entity for its operations in the US, which would be supervised by an independent council that would answer to the Government of Washington.

All workers at that entity would be Americans

.

The other option could be, plain and simple, the ban on TikTok in the US, where it has some 100 million accounts.

TikTok is the world's

fourth-largest social network

, but fears about its future in the US have reduced its value by around 11% to $220 billion.

The company currently has no plans to go public, partly due to these problems.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • Social media

  • Tik Tok

  • USA