In November 2019, further leaks exposed practices, not of deletion, but of burying, to prevent certain videos from attracting too much attention. TikTok has since set up an expert committee to review the company’s content moderation policies and put an end to the controversies. It is chaired by Dawn Nunziato, a professor at George Washington University College of Law and co-director of the Global Internet Freedom Project.
Finally, TikTok is suspected of surveillance practices which given the international context of the US-China confrontation, raise concerns of intelligence collection and espionage. This explains why the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has launched an investigation into ByteDance's takeover of Musical.ly to assess the threat level to US national security. The CFIUS particularly wants to ensure that the Chinese government does not have access to American citizens’ data and that it is indeed stored in the United States, an issue of data localization that has echoes in the French debate.
This approach was enabled by the recent extension of the CFIUS’ scope of intervention, following the adoption in 2018 of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA). The new provisions make it possible to block acquisitions of companies with access to sensitive personal data of a group larger than one million individuals. At the time of acquisition and prior to the integration into the TikTok platform, Musical.ly had 60 million users in the United States and Europe. US regulations define "sensitive" private data according to eleven categories, including financial data that could indicate personal hardship, health-related information and biometric identifiers. In addition to disinformation campaigns, access to this type of data allows the identification of vulnerabilities for recruitment by an intelligence agency.
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