#110: Access blocked
The Simulation of Transparency
Hi and Hello.
You are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. Today’s edition is not covering Tube Girl discourse and there is no Thinking about the Roman Empire – two short-lived trends and debates including dancing in the tube with or without wearing a huge t-shirt and a handful of men envisioning themselves as groping gladiators. Meanwhile PhD researcher Tinca Lukan has asked for social science content creators on TikTok. And she is right, there is a lack. If you have recommendations, please comment.
Today we talk about:
⚔️ Action speaks louder than words
💃🏿 Dances, Duets, and Debates
🏚️ TikTok Townsquares
💻 AI-generated
⚔️ Action speaks louder than words
TikTok has published “an update on the clear progress we have been making to combat the spread of harmful misinformation…” aka Code of Practice on Disinformation – Report of TikTok for the period 1 January 2023 - 30 June 2023 (Newsroom / PDF). Before delving into the flowery 255 pages i suggest to read the CoP Monitor, published by GADMO and the EDMO Ireland Hub first. Oh good lord, that is a lot of abbreviations! Let’s unwrap.
CoP, EDMO, GADMO
The Code of Practice on Disinformation (CoP) is a self-regulatory framework initiated by the EU Commission and signed by the major technology companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok), among others. It provides for numerous commitments that and how platforms should act against dis- and misinformation. The current version was published in 2022 and contains 128 concrete measures against dis- and misinformation. EDMO Ireland combats disinformation by bringing together fact-checkers, media literacy experts, technologists, and academic researchers. GADMO stands for German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory (GADMO) is an alliance of fact-checkers, media literacy experts and scientists taking a coordinated approach to combating disinformation and misinformation.
“The overall quality of reporting is less than adequate”
Back to the CoP Monitor. It examines the baseline reports published by the largest Signatories of the Strengthened Code in February 2023: Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and Twitter/X. The findings “show that the overall quality of reporting is less than adequate. More than half of the applicable Measures exhibited incomplete or missing qualitative information. Notably, quantitative data was absent in 64% of relevant instances, and when provided, the methodology was sometimes questionable with data often imprecise or missing on a Member State-level. Furthermore, Signatories frequently included information unrelated to the specific Measure in question.” Well.
Political Advertising - forbidden yet easy to find
Let’s dive into a concrete TikTok example because “the purported enforcement of TikTok's prohibition on political advertising appears to be inadequate.” Indeed: “A brief exploratory query of TikTok’s new ad library has surfaced numerous instances in which political and/or issue advertising was spread on the platform. Previous research has also shown that political advertising has escaped TikTok’s moderation systems and been published on the platform by partisan influencers.” You might remember the work by Mozilla: These Are “Not” Political Ads: How Partisan Influencers Are Evading TikTok’s Weak Political Ad Policies.
This echoes findings by researchers at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, a Berlin-based, non-profit think tank working on current political and societal challenges posed by new technologies. Quote: “it is not complicated at all to find such {polticial} ads…A simple search for the abbreviations of German political parties already shows numerous examples of ads placed by politicians or parties as well as a seemingly endless number of political ads by other people. Especially politicians of the ‘AfD’ seem to use ads on TikTok systematically to reach out to potential voters.”
Temporarily restricted - for what?!
When i tried to search the Commercial Content Library for “SPD Frankfurt” (Social democrats) or “Alternative für Deutschland” i immediately got “temporarily restricted from accessing TikTok’s Commercial Library” on several devices using different IPs. An interesting way of dealing with ad transparency or a creative way of solving a problem in the light of reporting as such: TikTok Has Pushed Chinese Propaganda Ads To Millions Across Europe (Forbes).
Can you access the data?
If you have 3 minutes to spare it would be great if you could go to TikTok’s Commercial Content Library and search for “SPD Frankfurt” and “Alternative für Deutschland”, scroll down,“load more” to see if it is only me (on several devices with different IPs) or a general issue. Thanks a lot!
💃🏿 Dances, Duets, and Debates
I am always happy to see more papers on political communication on TikTok. Here is another one, coming straight out of Zurich. Natalia Umansky and Christian Pipal provide a first examination of the ways in which U.S. politicians embrace and adapt to the TikTok platform. Employing a multimodal approach that studies video, text, and audio, we collect and analyse a novel dataset of TikTok videos created by U.S. Governors and Members of Congress to understand how they use comedic, documentary, communal, explanatory, interactive, and meta communication styles to connect with their audience. Umansky, N., & Pipal, C. (2023, September 21). Dances, Duets, and Debates: Analysing political communication and viewer engagement on TikTok. And if you want more, i recommend to read Securing the Youth Vote: A Comparative Analysis of Digital Persuasion on TikTok Among Political Actors.
🏚️ TikTok Townsquares
We have to talk about Google for a sec. “Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers” writes Charlie Warzel in this Atlantic article. If you want to line up in the ever growing line of cultural pessimists we could continue to lament the end of digital “town squares” as general-purpose, population-scale venues for all sorts of conversation with as few exceptions as possible as the New York Magazine has done recently. But here we are. You Really Should Be on TikTok. As Slate reminds us. And. Drum roll. TikTok may start serving you Google Search results (Techcrunch): As TikTok expands in every direction at once, it’s clear the app has ambitions to become a one-stop shop for anything users might want to do online. A new town square? Or rather strategy? It’s a custom integration, made for Google in this instance, which aims to provide more context, and facilitate more discovery via the TikTok app. Which, for both apps, probably makes some sense (Social Media Today).
💻 AI-generated
TikTok debuts new tools and technology to label AI content (Techcrunch): Labeling AI is becoming a more common practice for large platforms with both OpenAI and Google announcing their own AI detection capabilities in recent months. Instagram also appears to be working on a feature that highlights when content has been created or edited with AI. And the EU is pushing for platforms to label AI content as a general rule in its fight against disinformation. Questions that remain: Are the platforms able to detect advanced forms of AI-altered content when sophistically applied? Will the platforms (in this case TikTok) enforce their own guidelines? A group of German students recently uploaded a set of images – clearly AI-generated and violating the current AI guidelines – without any consequences. 🙄
🍹 What else?
28% of TikTok users are Gen Xers (TubeFilter)
Teens spend nearly 2 hours a day on TikTok — and barely look at Facebook (Insider)
Facial Recognition Tech and the end of privacy (404media)
Why TikTok Is Facing Bans in Africa (WSJ)
LGBTQIA + mental health on TikTok (Culture, Health & Sexuality)
Consuming entire TV episodes, series and movies on TikTok (Variety)
Get Rich or Die Tryin' (Insider)
Livestreaming around the clock (Wired)
Steroid TikTok (NBC)
Thanks for reading. And now send me your favourite TikTok. And if you dare please recommend this newsletter to a person you secretly admire.