בצרפת פתחו בחקירה נגד "טיקטוק" הסינית

Now over to France, where a court has opened a criminal probe into TikTok after allegations that its algorithm pushed minors towards suicide. The case follows multiple family lawsuits and a scathing parliamentary report calling the app a dangerous algorithmic trap. And to the international correspondent, David Vivès reports from Paris. France's justice system has opened a preliminary investigation into social media giant TikTok, following concerns that its algorithm could push minors towards suicide. This follows recent cases of teenagers who committed suicide across the country and a lawsuit filed by seven families accusing TikTok of exposing their children to content that encouraged self-harm. The commission heard from over 170 experts and received 30,000 testimonies from the public. One teenager testified before lawmakers. At first, I saw videos about art and music, but soon everything turned darker. I fell into a harmful loop. Investigators are now examining several potential offenses, including the promotion of methods for taking one's own life. A TikTok spokesperson told Reuters that the Chinese company categorically rejects what it calls the commission's misleading presentation. French lawmakers have been scrutinizing TikTok for years. In 2023, former Senator André Gatorin contributed to a report on the platform. He says there are signs that the Chinese Communist Party may use TikTok as a tool in its warfare operations. Generally speaking, social networks like Facebook and others become profitable fairly quickly, turning a profit after four, five or six years. TikTok, through Binance, has been around for many years, and they have more expenses than they have resources. They don't sell personal data, and for good reason. They don't market it because the destination is the Chinese regime, the Chinese Communist Party, which means filing as many people as possible. So the driving idea behind TikTok is not that TikTok should become a leader in its sector according to the accepted rules of international trade or capitalism, so to speak. The idea is to introduce a quasi-military offensive dimension, which could be described as hybrid warfare, in order to truly undermine the integrity and unity of a nation. In July, TikTok was fined $615 million by an EU agency after an Irish court found that users' data was accessible from China and insufficiently protected. Gatorin says this mass data collection effectively weaponizes TikTok against its users. We know there's a massive collection of data. It's a way of gaining control over the future of our societies, and that's extremely serious. TikTok said that there is no data transfer. But we have seen in investigations that there were Chinese computer scientists from ByteDance who broke into the app and then transferred data and stole it. You know, all these systems are called backdoors. And so if you leave the door open, you can't say that this is a robbery, I guess. A parliamentary report published in September 2025 recommended the ban of TikTok for teenagers younger than 15 years old. David Vives, NTD News, Paris. Thank you.