TikTok: to delete or not to delete? That is the question many, especially now Danish members of parliament, are asking, along with thousands of politicians, journalists and public figures worldwide. has been banned from using the app on their work phones.
Many Danish MPs had used TikTok as a political tool – such as Alex Vansplagh from the Liberal Alliance and Rosa Lund from Enhedslisten – and both have kept their profiles on their private phones. After all, the ‘ban’ is only enforced on government-issued devices.
Governments and intelligence agencies around the world appear to be waking up to the dangers of TikTok — and its shadowy parent company ByteDance — as the U.S. considers total ban of the app.
Is still popular
Despite the concern, and in some cases panic, spreading in the West over TikTok, the app remains hugely popular among important public figures.
Several British officials and journalists are currently parading the Chinese app, sharing videos declaring their allegiance to both their fans and the platform.
In addition, many public figures, such as politicians and broadcasters, seem to exist in a state of blissful – or even willful – ignorance about the way TikTok, and by extension ByteDance, harvests users’ data.
Impeaching privacy policies
Given the Danish Center for Cyber Security’s recent warning to the government about the connection between TikTok and Chinese espionage, something is clearly wrong with the most popular video sharing platform in the world.
TikTok’s headquarters are based in Beijing, which means the company is subject to Chinese cybersecurity law.
New laws passed in 2017 decree that the Chinese government has the right to access all data stored by every single company based on Chinese soil. TikTok users’ information is no exception.
ByteDance, along with TikTok’s Western representatives, have insisted there is nothing to worry about. Despite this, no conclusive evidence – or even solid arguments – have been offered to counter the idea that China is using TikTok data for its own purposes.
The people of Denmark
Danish commentators seem confused about the real threat from TikTok: In several recent debates about television, conflicts of opinion have abounded, although DR recently went the same way as the government.
The experts seem to be even more puzzled than the media. Some of them believe that we should all uninstall the Chinese-powered app immediately, while others are more lenient, recommending the use of a fake email when signing up for TikTok to avoid giving away your personal information .
“Tiktok is a raw harvester and an app that retrieves a lot of data,” says Henrik Moltke, DR’s tech expert, in a short documentary on DRTV. “I see it as neither more nor less dangerous than, for example, Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook.”
Elsewhere, in a TV2 article, Jørn Guldberg, an IT security expert at IDA, was quoted as saying: “TikTok has become much more invasive. Therefore, we have to be careful about what the Chinese government can sniff out through the app.”
Let us be ‘swayed’ by evidence
Amidst this plethora of opinions, there is a recent story that may shed some light on the matter.
In October 2022, Emily Baker-White, Richard Nieva and Katharine Schwab, three journalists from Forbes, was tracked via TikTok by a group of ByteDance employees based in China.
The evidence in the case included more than 80 hours of recordings of team meetings about how to spy on the journalists in the most intrusive ways.
While it is not uncommon for many popular data collection apps to share their users’ information with unspecified third parties in an unauthorized manner, this level of spying was never seen before. Some ByteDance employees were fired over the debacle, but that doesn’t seem to be enough to put the case to bed.
Democracy in danger
An interesting point Baker-White highlighted to DR was that TikTok “has an important effect on how we think about issues like what we think about public trust and, in a way, democracy itself”.
“It’s difficult to have an app that controls the way we think about democracy owned by a company controlled by an authoritarian state,” she added.
Others have pointed to TikTok’s promotion of an illiterate way of thinking that is diametrically opposed to the way of reasoning on which Western democracies are based. This point was summed up brilliantly by James Marriott in an article in The Times of London.
The strange thing is that no one seemed to consider that ByteDance is inextricably linked to a dictatorship, while TikTok was becoming the world’s most used social media platform – especially among Gen-Zere.
Disturbing side effects
Recent reports of numerous foundations and institutions researching the effects of digital platforms on human behavior shows how TikTok dramatically affects people’s mental health more than any other form of social media and is particularly harmful to Generation Z – those between the ages of 11 and 26.
TikTok provides an incredible variety of different video content that users can scroll through in a very short time. The information they absorb is digested and quickly consumed, eliminating any possibility of complex thought.
Its innovative and unique features (such as the famously uncanny accuracy of the ‘For Me’ section) have a damaging effect on everyone’s mind – especially for young and fragile people.
The problem is that we don’t yet fully understand how or why it’s so harmful, so people assume it’s harmless.
Bad for the brain
What’s more, the negative psychological impact of TikTok may not always be immediately noticeable.
“The app provides an endless stream of emotional nudges that can be hard to recognize and really affect users in the long run,” Marc Faddoul, the co-director of digital rights organization Tracking Exposed, told the Guardian.
It appeared from one examination conducted by DR this month, that educational institutions across Denmark agreed that widespread use of social media compromises young people’s opportunities to socialize.
In a joint statement about the study, the schools involved state this: “Our experience is that young people’s lives on social media or other digital platforms are having a negative impact on their participation in the community to a greater extent than ever before.”
Free country, free citizens … as long as we can make an informed choice
For the first time in the so-called ‘Digital Age’ we are playing with what could be described as a sci-fi weapon of mass destruction.
Many people, including prominent personalities, seem unable to process the fact that a video sharing app is capable of causing so much harm to society.
While a comprehensive ban is not necessarily the answer to what is already a major problem for Western countries, a proper social debate about TikTok’s more dangerous features should take place.
So many dangerous things are modern and yet harmful: smoking, drugs, Steff Houlberg sausages. But maybe the time has come for people to stop TikTok and start doing more Sudokus.
Source: The Nordic Page