For movie buffs, Rapid City at the foot of Mount Rushmore evokes Soviet spies tracking Cary Grant Death at the heels (1959), by Alfred Hitchcock. Sixty years later, South Dakota’s first city was grappling with other alleged 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 believed that Rapid City had other fish to fry and there was no evidence of Chinese espionage. Ultimately, the board rejected the proposal in early January, to the delight of Ms.myself Amstrong: “I’m not a big fan of the Chinese government, but getting sucked into what I consider media McCarthyism is not the solution”declared the aedile al Wall Street Journal.
The comparison is fair: For two and a half years, the United States has been involved in a cabal against TikTok, a mixture of anti-Chinese paranoia and puritanism, with the application accused of tricking young people with sexual incitement or addiction advice and dangerous, for example about diet, alcohol or drugs. The state of Indiana has filed a lawsuit. The problem is that the application has surpassed its American competitors, especially Instagram, and is a success with around one hundred million users. And in the small town of Rapid City, it’s everywhere: Firefighters use it to recruit; the waste collection company to explain to citizens how to dispose of their waste; the cultural center to promote its musicians.
When South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem banned the use of TikTok on all state devices in December 2022, there was consternation: The local tourism department, which had 60,000 subscribers, had to cancel its application; public broadcasting was to do the same, as were the state’s six public universities. Should TikTok be banned under the pretext that the company may be sucking up private data for the benefit of the Communist Party of China and manipulating the American population?
“A Trojan Horse”
The fight began in August 2020 under Donald Trump, who had already wanted to ban the telephone equipment of the Chinese company Huawei, suspected of being able to spy on or manipulate Americans remotely. But faced with the political impossibility of banning the popular TikTok app, the Republican president had wanted to Americanize it, to force its owner ByteDance to sell its US assets before September 15, 2020. Microsoft had shown interest, but the the deal fell through when it was discovered that the company 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 data and perform social network moderation, but the deal hadn’t closed either. Joe Biden, once he took office in the White House in January 2021, renounced the path of forced Americanization after the court rulings made it unworkable.
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