#128: The Future of TikTok
Spending warm summer days in courts
Hi!
You are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus, i am a research fellow at HAW Hamburg. Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy, writes Albert Fox Cahn (The Atlantic). As you already know
President Joe Biden signed a bill forcing TikTok to find a new owner within a year or face a ban (Politico). But this is the beginning, not the end of a long process. The deed is done. But it might be unconstitutional. Today we talk about:
👻 The Future of TikTok
🤬 TikTok Gaza Content
🐉 Good, Bad, and Very Good Propaganda
👻 The Future of TikTok
TikTok and its Chinese parent company filed a lawsuit challenging a new American law that would ban the popular video-sharing app in the U.S. unless it’s sold to an approved buyer, saying it unfairly singles out the platform and is an unprecedented attack on free speech (AP).
And while social media agencies are starting to adjust their strategies and preparing contingency plans (Digiday), current employees are “not too worried, knowing that TikTok’s promised legal fight is likely to last years" (Rest of world).
Core values
At the core of the legal battle is the collision of freedom of speech vs. state security interests. Law Professor Anupam Chander from Georgetown University has read the entire 67 TikTok lawsuit pages and comments on them in an epic and recommended x thread. If you are into documents i recommend The Knight First Amendment Institute’s Amicus Brief (a term i had to google). It is 38 pages long and includes gems like this one: The practice of ideological exclusion gradually came to be regarded as irreconcileable with the core values of an open society."
The two main arguments to ban TikTok are a) concerns that TikTok could pass sensitive user data to the Chinese government and b) that the CCP could misuse TikTok to spread disinformation and propaganda.
Twerking
TikTok is Chinese at its core, reports Rest of World and argues that “TikTok remains answerable to ByteDance rather than its international leadership” while the Financial Times has spoken to more than two dozen current and former TikTok staff about how Chinese owners ByteDance have tightened its grip on the platform in the wake of a US ban. Quote: “Chinese leaders have deemed twerking too sexually suggestive, demanding it be taken down or rendered harder to find, the people said, while their US counterparts have repeatedly pushed back.”
Culture – lost forever
Exaggerating the effects of foreign influence campaigns serves only the foreign operatives, writes Foreign Affairs while security studies researcher Inga Trauthig argues that India’s TikTok ban didn’t even slow disinformation for The Hill and “the culture got lost forever” as Thomas Germain reminds us. Anyways. The magical algorithm is really just a basic recommender system, tweets NYU professor Sol Messing even if it is turbocharged and a TikTok ban will accelerate the ‘splinternet’ (FT).
Meanwhile i am still paving my way through a German legal journal article called: Bans on access to communication platforms to protect (inter)national security – a fundamental rights-based overview by Urs Saxer and Roman Kollenberg while the Trump campaign weighs joining TikTok (Washington Post). 🤡
🤬 TikTok Gaza Content
One reason lawmakers banned TikTok is that there are more pro-Palestine posts than pro-Israel ones on the platform. At least that is what Sen. Romney is telling United States secretary of state Blinken in this video shared by Louise Matsakis. Despite the fact that TikTok is popular in Muslim countries the war in Gaza has been again and again used to blame TikTok of antisemitism culminating in pointless claims that “TikTok made you 17% more antisemitic every 30 minutes” (compare #117).
Thankfully Politico has teamed up with Laura Edelson, a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston, to track pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli TikTok content over four months between Oct. 7, 2023, and Jan. 29, 2024. The results are very interesting: Between Oct. 27 and Dec. 15, pro-Israeli content overtook pro-Palestinian material, based on views per post data, despite the overall volume of pro-Palestinian content still far out-stripping pro-Israeli material.
“The likeliest explanation — based on overall pro-Palestinian content still outpacing pro-Israeli posts — is an adjustment to how the company’s algorithms populated people’s feeds.” Or as Edelson puts it in a posting (Getting to know the TikTok Research API): “This is an area where feed algorithms suffer from a structural lack of transparency. It isn't hard to figure out the political stance of the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal. But social media feed algorithms, whether their makers intend them to or not, also have political stances - they are just much harder to observe.”
We hardly understand what ‘the algorithm’ is doing, writes Edelson. We are in a crisis of research access to data. And in a crisis of uninformed claims.
🐉 Good, bad, and very good propaganda
Russia’s state propaganda seems to be back on TikTok, Valerie Wirtschafter has observed for Brookings: Russian state-affiliated accounts have accelerated their use of TikTok since the start of 2024. Although Russian state-affiliated accounts are far more active on other platforms, engagement per post on TikTok is much higher.
Meanwhile Wired asks why China is so bad at disinformation: “the content pushed by the Spamouflage campaign has lacked nuance and audience-specific content that successful nation-state disinformation campaigns from countries like Russia, Iran, and Turkey have included.” Elise Thomas from ISD argues that the CCP gets better: “I found a small number of accounts which were posing convincingly as Americans. They were building this authentic audience and then they were posting these sort of pro-Trump memes, pro-Trump news, and sort of anti-woke stuff […] they were getting real engagement […] from real people in like significant numbers, incredibly from Alex Jones once. And that is a real shift and really concerning.”
Maybe and just maybe they are learning from the best aka the international folks turning Chinese Glycine factories into a) art or b) meme-infused propaganda. Kyle Chayka wrote it down for the New Yorker. Louise Matsakis saw it first.
✂️ What’s not in this newsletter
1) High Density is over – a reflective take on the possible end of retention editing, first reported by Taylor Lorenz (Washington Post), expanded by Ryan Broderick with observations about the third pivot to video (Garbage Day).
2) Kartoffel Forever – an extensive style critique of TeamBundeskanzler, friends and foes. German chancellor Olaf Scholz and team have been tiktoking for a month now, they have inspired not only the German Vice-chancellor, set new trends for political communication 2024 (What’s in my bag) and sparked an AI army of Scholz-Lookalikes. Will write about that soon. Promise.
3) Virtual Influencers, Carousel postings, Research TikPy, The Death of the follower, TikTok and Universal, The AfD Dashboard, Bottom Up Content Creation
🐝 What i am doing these days
I have been quite silent here. And a bit too chatty everywhere else in the last couple of weeks. Wanna hook up on LinkedIn? I have continued consulting for a TikTok format development at a German public broadcaster, have written an extensive article on disinformation, TikTok and the European parliamentary elections, started a small research project on political campaigning, got some invitations to talk and discuss the current status quo of TikTok, challenges for political parties and media organisations and got accepted for a paper presentation together with Tom Divon at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in Sheffield.
You are herby cordially invited to my EU Disinfo Lab webinar, May 23: TikTok in the Era of Propaganda & Disinformation. Thanks for reading. This is the end. Of the world as we know. Artwork this week is by Czech artist Jan Matulka. His painting Autumn Landscape (1921) is on the cover of Tom Petty’s album “Into the Great Wide Open”. It was my ear worm writing about the future of TikTok. Speak soon. Ciao, Marcus.