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.
Unpacking the Racism of Digital Blackface in the Information Age
Digital blackface
Digital blackface is a term used to describe the phenomenon of non-Black individuals using digital media, such as GIFs, memes, or audio clips featuring Black individuals, to express emotions or convey ideas. This behavior has sparked debate and criticism due to concerns about cultural appropriation and the perpetuation of stereotypes. Digital blackface has been described as "one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism"[1] and has been compared to historical minstrelsy by Black individuals and social justice advocates.
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.
BORDERLESS | TikTok, Instagram
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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.
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Discover communities, trending conversations, and social media built for you.
TikTok is pulling back on an AI feature that went haywire
TikTok is pulling back on an AI feature that added wildly inaccurate text summaries to videos from users like Charli D'Amelio and Shakira.
TikToker faces police probe over secret filming using Meta 'smart glasses'
The "content maker" published videos of encounters with young women and a female Sikh shop worker where he talked of a plot to "breed out the white race".
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?
Dark web users cite Grok as tool for making 'criminal imagery' of kids, U.K. watchdog says
The Internet Watch Foundation said it found topless images of girls that dark web forum users attributed to xAI’s Grok Imagine.
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
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.
Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers
A hacker gained control of a 1,100 mobile phone farm powering covert, AI-generated ads on TikTok.
Digital blackface
AI and non-AI
TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface
Unpacking the Racism of Digital Blackface in the Information Age
Hey everyone! After some discussion internally, we’ve decided to launch a new moderation label for “Digital Blackface”. This makes Digital…
Exposing The Hungry Historian (aka Potlikker's) A.I. Slop
The Hungry Historian (Potlikker_Offical): Digital Blackface, AI Slop, and Soul Food Deception — soulfoodetc
Digital blackface