TikTok is risking its future in the coming months and knows it. The pressure is growing for the application to be finally banned in the United States, so the Chinese company has no choice but to play the transparency card. Of full transparency.
This is the only way to explain the last decision they have made. And it is that in what is the first public statement since the appointment of ex-Disney Kevin Mayer as new CEO, the company has announced that it will make public the code that its algorithms use to moderate the content that is published on the platform. Furthermore, it also announced that it will reveal its data flows to regulators, inviting the rest of its competitors to follow suit.
With what is undoubtedly an unprecedented movement in the technology industry, the social network seeks to gain the trust of authorities that in recent months have taken it for granted that TikTok is a new "Trojan horse" that aims to send More compromised data from its users to Chinese servers. In other words: its managers are doing what is in their hands not to become a new "Huawei case".
In the statement, Kevin Mayer states that “TikTok has become the last objective to beat, but we are not the enemy. Let's take advantage of this moment to have deeper conversations around algorithms, transparency, and content moderation, in order to develop stricter rules. ”
This announcement comes days after the company announced its plans to launch a "Transparency Center" in Los Angeles, which will be responsible for reviewing content moderation policies. At the same time, the Chinese multinational has announced the creation of a creator support fund that will have a budget of 3 billion $ for the next three years.
Historically, companies like Google or Facebook have argued that making public the way their algorithms work would make them easy victims of hackers and other cybercriminals. The challenge therefore for TikTok is twofold: to gain in transparency without losing in security.
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