If culture is shaped by TikTok's algorithmic feed, then it's time for us to decide where we draw the line between necessary marketing and inauthentic growth hacking.
The TikTok AI Slop Report
New research from Kapwing reveals that nearly 60% of TikToks served to new users and children are AI slop. But which categories and tags are the worst affected — and what does this landscape look like to kids?
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.
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.
Stop generating, start thinking - localghost
Instead of wanting to learn and improve as humans, and build better software, we’ve outsourced our mistakes to an unthinking algorithm.
New advertiser incentive program | TikTok for Business
This article provides an overview of TikTok's acquisition incentive programs for new advertisers.
Pluralistic: Tiktokification shall set us free (17 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.
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.
Growth Hacking Made Simple: Definition
Learn how big brands like Spotify and Facebook use growth hacking to increase their influence and user base in this ultimate guide.
+KAOS: Ten Years of Hacking and Media Activism
At the end of the 20th century, hacking was bleeding edge. When the ideas, practices and pranks of this experimental niche of technophiles attracted the attention of a handful of activists in Italy, they understood that information and communication were what would give shape and voice to social, political, and cultural processes in the near future. +KAOS is a cut and paste of interviews, like a documentary film transposed on paper. It describes the peculiar relationship between hacktivism and activism, in Italy and beyond, highlighting the importance of maintaining digital infrastructures. While this may not sound as glamorous as sneaking into a server and leaking data, it is a fundamental topic: not even the most emblematic group of hacktivists can operate without the services of radical server collectives. Autistici/Inventati (https://www.autistici.org - https://www.inventati.org)
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
Building your own algorithm on Bluesky and AT Protocol with Graze
Hacking Capitalism | A Guide To Exploiting The Tech Industry
This is an independently published book about modeling the tech industry as a system. Particularly this book will model computers, humans, and money and their subsequent relationships. Understand the alarming state of the tech industry for better or for worse.
Nepal's Gen Z Used TikTok and Discord to Win a Historic Election
The election of rapper-turned politician Balen Shah was shaped by platforms and algorithms built on the other side of the world, writes Aaradhyaa Gyawali.
Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software
In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point…
We Needn't Have a One True Platform - Aaron Ross Powell
On Bluesky, user numbers, and the silliness of endless growth.
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Around the world, building the internet’s operating system—and a better way to work. In a world of tech companies fighting for growth at any cost, imagine one that gives away its most successful pr…
