This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 23rd, 2022. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

TikTok dominates youth culture in the West, but when critical questions come up, they put a lid on it.

Who actually calls the shots at the world’s most popular app right now?

The question is being widely debated around the world, but a blog post by Swedish Marika Tedroff, a former employee on TikTok’s policy team, offers some insight. By her third week on the job she was writing global policies — that is, the rules dictating which content is published and prioritised — that affected a billion people.

In an interview with the newsletter Platformer, she describes how decisions were made lightly and quickly.

“I never got the impression that they [TikTok] had bad intentions, but rather a lack of awareness. […] I think the company’s hierarchical culture influenced these kinds of decisions; finishing the task was more important than doing it properly.”

Tedroff stresses in the interview that her experience at TikTok was mixed — she describes the company as both a fantastic place to work and toxic at the same time. A picture confirmed by others SvD has spoken with.

Keeping order among a billion users, while understanding how content is viewed in different cultures, is a complex task to say the least. And with low transparency both inside the company and toward the outside world, plenty of question marks remain about how decision-making at TikTok actually happens.

In connection with the Pontus Rasmusson investigation, SvD has contacted the company several times without receiving a reply. It is probably easier for TikTok to stay silent than to explain how they view Pontus Rasmusson’s posts, with their repeated sexual references, or the fact that he let young users call premium-rate numbers during a live broadcast on the app.

When SvD investigated TikTok last autumn with a focus on how the app handled issues around eating disorders, it also took a long time before a written answer came. Just before Christmas last year, TikTok announced that they had problems with the algorithm serving the same content and that it could be problematic if it concerned things like “extreme dieting”.

In light of the above, the interview with Marika Tedroff is interesting. She describes a complex internal process preceding decisions about TikTok’s rules. According to her, it involves legal, PR, lobbying, child safety and advice from outside experts. And she is clear that their work made a difference.

Fair enough. But without transparency about how these rules are followed, it is hard to judge what responsibility the platform actually takes for its content.

Several heavyweight names internationally are now taking a similar line.

Mathias Döpfner, CEO of media group Axel Springer, said in a conference speech that “TikTok should be banned in all democracies”. He accused Western governments of being “naive and dangerous” for allowing the app to operate in their countries. In the follow-up interview, Döpfner went a step further and called the app “a tool for espionage” for the Chinese regime.

One important dimension is that TikTok is only a product for Western markets. The domestic predecessor Douyin (which is also very popular, but in China) has entirely different rules and regulations. This despite the fact that the parent company, ByteDance, is the same. For Douyin the entertainment profile has been toned down considerably, and the company now says it is on its way to becoming more of a “lifestyle app” instead. That Chinese tech companies have shifted strategy in response to input from Beijing is something we have seen many times before.

The question the West should now be asking is how to relate to the power and influence the big tech platforms have. A billion people in a single app means many minutes spent every day. And even if the app is not explicitly engaged in outright spying, influence can still happen through the content that is presented. Former employees at parent company ByteDance have claimed they gave more visibility to pro-China news in another of the company’s apps. That this happens on TikTok can therefore not be ruled out.

Given all this, you can understand why TikTok does not want to respond when SvD gets in touch. The silence is telling. Do the Swedish spokespeople even know themselves how everything works?

But as long as the users keep coming back, the criticism is a lesser problem for TikTok. For the rest of us, the problem risks becoming all the greater.