Never before has a platform grown as fast as TikTok. We have gained exclusive insight into its content moderation and are publishing excerpts from its moderation rules: TikTok operates a sophisticated system to identify, control, suppress and direct content. The platform can throttle videos of protests and demonstrations according to its rules.
How TikTok Is Rewriting the World (Published 2019)
TikTok will change the way your social media works — even if you’re avoiding it.
How TikTok ate the internet
You don’t tell TikTok what you want to see. It tells you. And the internet can’t get enough.
Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise after evidence outrage drove engagement - whistleblowers
Companies allowed more harmful content on user’s feeds, knowing their algorithms ran on outrage, BBC hears.
Essay: How do you describe TikTok?
The automatic culture of the world's favorite new social network.
Everyone's very angry online right now
Read to the end for a truly incredible TikTok video
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
When Libs of TikTok tweets, threats increasingly follow
The pattern – Libs of TikTok tweets, then a bomb threat arrives – is more pervasive than previously known. And it has ratcheted up in the past two months.
What Comes After TikTok
Last month, the U.S. gave TikTok a choice—either its owner, Chinese artificial intelligence company ByteDance, has to sell it, or it will face a federal ban. As we wait to see how ByteDance responds, more than 25 U.S. states have gone ahead and banned the app from state employees’ devices. And ...
This TikTok account pumped out fake war footage with AI — until CBC News investigated | CBC News
A TikTok account sharing AI-generated videos of explosions and burning cities has disappeared from the platform. But the type of content it hosted — what experts call “AI slop” — is still going strong.
TikTok - Make Your Day
TikTok - trends start here. On a device or on the web, viewers can watch and discover millions of personalized short videos. Download the app to get started.
TikTok - Make Your Day
TikTok - trends start here. On a device or on the web, viewers can watch and discover millions of personalized short videos. Download the app to get started.
There's A Deadly Drinking Problem On TikTok
While the app has strict rules prohibiting branded content promoting alcohol, creators are still allegedly making money drinking to excess — and at least one has died.
Aral Balkan (@aral@mastodon.ar.al)
Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are… So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is). Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social. That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.) The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…) So @_elena@mastodon.social calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹): https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mqob7shxks2t Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger: > “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z) Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in. These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want. 🤡🤡🤡 Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity. > “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³ But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it. Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control? And if so, why can’t they even get that right? Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead. Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them. So, yeah, how’s your Monday going? ¹ e.g., https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333053823108, etc. ² https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTECDMT2 ³ https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.) ⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: https://codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/branch/main/wsocial-pds-stats.js Also see https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ and https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/ #WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission
TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface
On the app, users drape themselves in the trappings of Black culture—and steal the viral spotlight. It’s exploitation at its most refined and disturbing.
TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone
Escaping the platform's addictive grasp means first overhauling our relationship to our devices.
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.