“Inadequate controls on minors”. Another tile up TikTok after the vote in the US House which aims to ban the use of the platform in the United States: a law that the American president Joe Biden he already said to fully support. Today, in fact, there is news that the Competition and Market Authority has imposed a fine of 10 million euros jointly and severally on three companies of the Bytedance Ltd group, namely the Irish TikTok Technology Limited, the British TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and the Italian TikTok Italy Srl. The accusation? Unfair commercial practice. In fact, according to the Authority, TikTok does not properly monitor the contents circulating on the platform, especially those that may threaten the safety of minors and vulnerable subjects.
TikTok, the Authority's accusations
The investigative activity made it possible to ascertain TikTok's responsibility in the dissemination of contents - such as those relating to the "French scar" challenge - likely to threaten the psycho-physical safety of users, especially if they are minors and vulnerable. Furthermore, TikTok has not taken adequate measures to avoid the spread of such content, not fully respecting the "Guidelines" with which it has adopted and which it has made known to consumers, reassuring them that the platform is a "safe" space. The "Guidelines" are in fact applied without adequately taking into account the specific vulnerability of adolescents, characterized by peculiar cognitive mechanisms from which derive, for example, the difficulty in distinguishing reality from fiction and the tendency to emulate group behavior.
Finally, the contents - despite being potentially dangerous - are disseminated through a "recommendation system" based on algorithmic user profiling, which constantly selects which videos to allocate to each consumer in the sections called "For You" and "Followed", with the The aim is to increase interactions between users and the time spent on the platform so as to increase the profitability of advertising revenues. This causes undue conditioning of users who are encouraged to use the platform more and more.
TikTok, the Chinese company promises battle
Meanwhile, the CEO of TikTok, Shou Chew, threatens battle. He promises "everything possible" to defend the platform after yesterday the US House approved a law that could ban TikTok, owned by Chinese ByteDance. According to Shou, who made her voice heard with a video released in the last few hours, the law "will give greater power to a small group of other social media companies". For the boss of TikTok, which claims to have 170 million users in the US, will “put 300.000 jobs at risk” in the States.
