TikTok 04 Newsletter
Newsflash, Investigating TikTok and Politicians
Good day people!
Today you get a free newsflash, 27 links, we will talk about how you can monitor TikTok to inform your reporting and i will point you to two lists including fellow journalists and german politicians on the platform.
📰Newsflash
🩺 Investigating TikTok
🎷 Politicians
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📰 Newsflash
TikTok is no longer number 1. Zoom has more downloads now. TikTok is not yet banned in the US. By the way: Trump Can’t Ban TikTok, but He Can Hurt It (Foreign Policy, July 24, 2020) Should you delete the app? The way it gathers data is no different from other tech giants (Guardian, July 21,2020). The article includes my quote of the week
Much of the anger currently directed against the app hinges on geopolitical tensions, an attempt to rightly raise objections about systematic, ongoing human rights abuses in China, and a deeper fear about what TikTok represents: the eastwards migration of technological supremacy away from the US and towards China….Republicans who remember the effect that blue jeans, pop music and McDonald’s had on the Soviet Union recognise the potential impact of TikTok’s soft power.
🩺 Investigating TikTok
La Grange Police obviously did not need further research knowledge in order to arrest the young man that taunted them on TikTok: Come and get me bi**h.
But if you want to monitor TikTok to inform your reporting you should check out this video by First Draft. I saw it linked in the recommended german newsletter SMWB.
First Draft is a project "to fight mis- and disinformation online" founded in 2015 by nine organizations brought together by the Google News Lab. A very good resource of information.
Laura Garcia gives a great intro and shows some ways on how to find certain videos, how to extract infos and for example find date and time stamps etc.
+ Here is a doc with BASIC Open Source Intelligence
+ Here is a TikTok Quick Search tool
+ Here is Bellingcats: Investigate TikTok Like A Pro!
+ Here is a TikTok Scraper on Github
Francesco Zaffarano, senior social media editor for The Daily Telegraph has made a running list of 140+ journalism accounts on TikTok. Jeremy Caplan has turned the curated list into an app version. That means you can save the list on your mobile home screen in order to a) search the list and b) directly jump to the account on TikTok.
🎷 Politicians
TikTok Is Shaping Politics (New York Times, June 28, 2020). Teenagers are campaigning, debating, running fact checks and forming party-based coalitions (New York Times, April 29, 2020). Quote by Izzy, 17, pro-Sanders TikToker:
I feel like I am making an impact on the election even though I can’t vote
And yet, not a single 2020 hopeful — either Republican or Democrat — is actively using it (USA Today, Dec 15, 2019).
Where are the actual politicians? That is a question that needs further investigation, but here are a bunch of first findings:
🇺🇸AOC is not on TikTok but she is at least producing bootlegs. Waiting for her Insta Reels
🇫🇷Democratic socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (and his team) have been playing around with TikTok. Well there are two TikToks
🇩🇪The Federal Ministry of Health startet using TikTok during the pandemic. It published 44 TikToks between March 25 and June 24. Besides that most german politicians are reluctant. Apart from a bunch of people like Thomas Sattelberger (FDP), Jonas Bayer (FDP), Tobias Hans (CDU) and the SPD Perlach-Waldperlach. Martin Fuchs aka @wahl_beobachter has produced an Excel sheet with all of them. Check it out here. More Infos: Die Politik entdeckt TikTok (BR24, March 23 GERMAN).
Have you seen more examples of politicians using TikTok?
Please let me know, i will share your findings in the next newsletter.
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Thx for the attention. If you want, spread the news.
✌️Marcus