TikTok Newsletter 70
State-of-the-art Cyber
Hi,
this is Understanding TikTok – your weekly TikTok update. My name is Marcus.
Snapchat and Facebook agree that the future of social media looks like TikTok (The Verge). After having a better product for years, TikTok passed Instagram in total aggregate time spent globally, tweets Turner Novak (per App Annie).
This week we talk about:
⛄ Beijing 2022
🧶 New policies, old problems
🗞️ JournoTok
⛄ Beijing 2022
I am sorry. Still no #OlympicSpirit at all around here. But yet again Athletes TikTok during a major sports event is a thing. Some say it is more interesting than the actual event. Go and find out if you like.
Here Are the Team USA Athletes You Should Be Following During Winter Games (People). Olympic athletes are jumping on TikTok trends to provide tours of their rooms (Toronto Star). 9 Olympians to follow on TikTok right now (Mashable). Athletes take to social media to give fans a view from inside the bubble (New York Times). How to Watch the Winter Olympics on TikTok (Inside Hook).
🧶 New policies, old problems
TikTok just announced a series of policy updates and plans for new features and technologies aimed at making the video-based social network a safer and more secure environment, particularly for younger users (Techcrunch).
In a public post Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety, described the main updates, e.g. “adding clarity on the types of hateful ideologies prohibited on our platform. This includes deadnaming, misgendering, or misogyny as well as content that supports or promotes conversion therapy programmes.”
While this sounds good, TikTok has always been good at promising great things without doing much afterwards. See our investigation for Mozilla – Broken Promises: TikTok and the German Election. For example: It is not necessarily the community guidelines that are a problem but the lack of enforcement.
To be honest “we're opening state-of-the-art cyber incident monitoring and investigative response centres in Washington DC, Dublin, and Singapore this year” sounds great, but what does that even mean. And “TikTok's Fusion Centre operations enable follow-the-sun threat monitoring and intelligence gathering” – yeah, but just a little bit more transparency in the Community Guidelines Enforcement Report would be cool for a start.
More than 60 million videos were removed by hand between July and September 2021. But it remains unclear how many content moderators work for TikTok. We only know of cases where moderators sued TikTok over 'psychological trauma' (BBC).
0.89% of all videos removed fell into the category “violent extremism” according to TikTok. According to a report by ISD from 2021 “Hateful and extremist content is removed on TikTok, but inconsistently. 191 videos, 18.5% of the full sample, were removed or were no longer available on TikTok by the end of the data collection period. The remainder, 81.5%, were still live at the time of writing.”
On the same day the policies were published, Media Matters published new research too: TikTok is enabling predatory ADHD advertisers to target young users.
🗞️ JournoTok
A handful of news media companies now have more than 1 million followers on TikTok, a testament to how much the viral video platform has become a central place for Gen-Zers to get news, reports Axios.
TikTok – according to numbers by Pew Research Center in September 2021 – has seen a slight uptick in the portion of users who say they regularly get news on the site. Publishers are already planning to put more effort into TikTok. At least this is what they have been telling the folks from Reuters Institute for their Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2022.
What is your favorite media/news TikTok account? Please let me know in the comments. Thanks!
🍅 What else?
TikTok is rolling out the ability to post five minute videos to more users, tweets Chris.
Bella Hadid Is The Queen Of TikTok Right Now (Vogue). Well, if you say so. Maybe this is old news too. I have not seen a new TikTok of her for over a week now. But hey, Kendall Jenner has finally posted her first TikTok video (Daily Mail, Buzzfeed). Before you ask. No. Beyonce has still not posted anything.
You remember the Island Boys from #68? A police raid at TikTok stars, Island Boys’, home leads to the arrest of a suspect involved in the murder of an 8-year-old girl (Complex).
TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it’s unclear where it goes, study says (CNBC). Who would have thought?!
#paid is a Creator Marketing Platform. They are trying out daily Daily 60sec #TikTok Reports. I like the idea. And i am actually happy that somebody does it, so i do not have too.
How much do creators make on the platform. A topic for debate and for TikTok videos. Here is one. And by the way: Do Creators Of Popular TikTok Sounds Make Any Money? (The List)
That’s it for today. Speak soon. Ciao.