For movie buffs, Rapid City at the foot of Mount Rushmore evokes the Soviet spies tracking down Cary Grant in Death on the heels (1959), by Alfred Hitchcock. Sixty years later, the first city of South Dakota was struggling with other supposed spies: the Chinese and their social network TikTok. Councilman Jason Salamun wanted to ban the app from the city, citing national security risks. His opponent was Councilwoman Laura Armstrong, who felt Rapid City had other fish to fry and there was no evidence of Chinese espionage. In the end, the council rejected the proposal in early January, to the delight of Ms.me Armstrong : “I’m not a big fan of the Chinese government, but being sucked into what I consider to be media McCarthyism is not the solution”declared the aedile to the Wall Street Journal.
The comparison is fair enough: for two and a half years, the United States has been caught up in a cabal against TikTok, a mixture of anti-Chinese paranoia and puritanism, the application being accused of misleading young people with sexual incitement or addictive advice and dangerous, for example on diets, alcohol or drugs. The state of Indiana has filed suit. The problem is that the application has overtaken its American competitors, in particular Instagram, and is a hit with some one hundred million users. And in the small town of Rapid City, it’s everywhere: firefighters use it to recruit; the garbage collection company to explain to citizens how to dispose of their garbage; the cultural center to promote its musicians.
When in December 2022 the governor of South Dakota, Republican Kristi Noem, banned the use of TikTok on all state-owned devices, there was consternation: the local tourism department, which had sixty thousand subscribers , had to delete his application; public broadcasting had to do the same, as did the state’s six public universities. Should TikTok be banned on the pretext that the firm could suck up private data for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party and manipulate the American population?
“A Trojan Horse”
The fight began in August 2020 under Donald Trump, who had already wanted to ban telephone equipment from the Chinese firm Huawei, suspected of being able to spy on or manipulate Americans remotely. But faced with the political impossibility of banning the popular TikTok application, the Republican president had wanted to Americanize it, force the sale of its activities in the United States by its owner ByteDance before September 15, 2020. Microsoft had shown itself interested, but the deal fell through when it turned out that the firm founded by Bill Gates would not have access to the software that makes TikTok so effective. Oracle and Walmart had taken over, offering to store the data and carry out the moderation of the social network, but the deal had not been made either. Joe Biden, once installed in the White House in January 2021, renounced the path of forced Americanization, after court rulings made it impractical.
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