“If the parents have an addiction, it should not be surprising that the children have one“. Just a few weeks after joining the board of directors of TikTok, the boss of Free was questioned about the addiction of young people to social networks. A sensitive subject for the French billionaire, who knows that he is expected at the turning point on this thorny issue at the microphone of France Inter.
Should we really defend TikTok?
Since its international expansion, TikTok worried. We will move past the accusations of backdoor and political espionage to focus on one of the central arguments that animate the social network’s detractors: its algorithm. With its infinite vertical scroll, its dopamine-boosted short videos and its extremely effective dark patterns, the app is a time sinkwhich plunges us into long hours of frenetic, and sometimes uncontrolled, consumption. This is all the more true for young adolescents, who spend more and more time on the platform, to the point of having made it one of the most downloaded applications in the world.
By joining TikTok, Xavier Niel knew he was advancing in a minefield. If the French businessman did not deny the problem of addiction to social platforms – and more generally to screens – he also pointed out the responsibility of parents in the equation. He believes in particular that education is a key factor in the successful learning of social networks, and that the lack of responsibility in the family educational environment is partly responsible for these possible addictive behaviors. Even if the speech is undoubtedly motivated by his personal interests, it is difficult to blame him.
Regulating TikTok from the inside
Asked about his arrival at Tiktok, Xavier Niel also spoke of his desire to bring a European perspective in the company. Faced with criticism accusing him of having joined one of the most controversial firms of his generation, he believes: “It is a company which had five directors, three Americans and two Chinese. (…) It didn’t seem stupid to me that, for once, Europe could put forward its point of view, its ideas“. Once again, the idea has the merit of being interesting. By joining TikTok’s board of directors, the businessman hopes to regulate TikTok from the inside, by promoting access to educational content. He also insisted on the fact that social networks were not not inherently harmful for adolescents, while recognizing the role of recommendation algorithms: “It depends on what you look at, it depends on what the algorithms put in front of you“. It remains to be seen how things will evolve with a Frenchman at the head of the company.
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