The TikTok app has been racking up controversy around the world, from its ban on teenagers in Australia to its ban in Albania and accusations of espionage in the United States and even more so the investigation launched by the European Union after suspicions of foreign interference in Romania.

The app will be shut down in Albania for at least a year starting in early 2025, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama announced today.

“TikTok is the neighborhood thug,” Rama said during a meeting in Tirana with Albanian educators, parents and psychologists. “We will banish this thug from our neighborhood for a year“, he added.

The announcement of the shutdown of the controversial social network comes less than a month after a 14-year-old student was killed and another injured in a fight near a school in Tirana, following an argument over social media.

Romanian authorities suspect far-right candidate Calin Gheorgescu, who came first in the first round of presidential elections in November to everyone’s surprise, of benefiting from an illegal endorsement campaign orchestrated by Moscow, mainly through TikTok, owned by Chinese conglomerate ByteDance .

The European Commission announced on Tuesday the launch of an investigation that will focus in particular on TikTok’s recommendation systems, which are suspected to have been used for “coordinated manipulation”.

It will also look at managing the “political ads and sponsored political content” platform.

In case of proven infringements, the Commission can, under the Digital Services Regulation (DSA), impose fines of up to 6% of the offender’s annual turnover. In case of serious and repeated infringements, platforms can even theoretically be banned from all activity in Europe.

In the United States, a law passed in April forces TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the social network by Jan. 19 — accusing it of allowing Chinese authorities to unreasonably collect data on American users — or be banned from operating. of.

The app, which has 170 million active users in this country, asked the United States Supreme Court on Monday to request a stay of that law.

It denounces “a massive and unprecedented curtailment of freedom of speech” and has repeatedly denied passing on information to the Beijing government.

To preserve their data, the US federal government, the European Commission as well as the British parliament and government had already banned the download and use of TikTok on their employees’ business devices in 2023.

The social network, which has more than 1 billion active users worldwide, is particularly popular with young people, who are drawn to the format of ultra-short videos that appear there.

The app surpasses all its competitors in its ability to attract attention. By 2024, Android users were using it an average of 34 hours each month, according to data from We Are Social.

But this huge success comes with criticism.

Its critics accuse TikTok of limiting users to a certain amount of content, through an opaque algorithm, and of promoting the spread of misinformation and illegal, violent or obscene content, particularly among young people.

In Australia, parliament passed a law in late November banning access to social networks for people under the age of 16, one of the strictest measures in the world in this area.

TikTok was already in the eye of the storm last spring, when the company launched in France and Spain a feature of its new TikTok Lite app that rewards users for screen time, sparking the opening of an investigation in Brussels .

Subsequently, the European Commission assessed that the application poses “serious risks to the mental health of users”.

The social network was forced to fold and announced the permanent withdrawal of this rewards program.

TikTok was temporarily banned by the French government in May in New Caledonia during deadly riots against an electoral reform plan.

In Nepal, TikTok, accused of disrupting “social harmony”, was banned between November 2023 and August 2024.

The social network has also been banned since 2020 in India following deadly border clashes with China.