TikTok Newsletter 79
Your attention sucks. Don't worry.
Hi!
This is Understanding TikTok – your TikTok update. My name is Marcus. Today we talk about:
🇺🇦 Ukraine Status Update
⏲️ How long is too short
🔬 TikTok Research 2022
🇺🇦 Ukraine Status Update
First, let’s recap the last days concerning the war and TikTok.
⚡ You do remember the great job the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has done by analysing and visualising TikTok feeds from Ukraine and Russia (#77): Worlds apart. Editor Christian Nicolai Bjørke explains how they accomplished this on a technical level. The interview is in german, but worthwhile to be translated if you want to hear more on Selenium, Beautiful South, ElasticSearch and Kibana.
⚡ There are 374.9M views for #ghostofkyiv and 103.3 M views for #ghostofkiev on TikTok. The Ghost of Kyiv was the nickname given to a fictitious MiG-29 Fulcrum flying ace credited with shooting down six Russian planes over Kyiv during the Kyiv offensive on 24 February 2022. The Ukrainian Air Force Command has now admitted (NBC News) the pilot was a “superhero legend whose character was created by Ukrainians.”
⚡ Russia’s trolling on Ukraine gets ‘incredible traction’ on TikTok, writes The Guardian: Darren Linvill, professor at Clemson University, South Carolina, who has been studying the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA) troll farm operation since 2017, said it was succeeding in creating more authentic-seeming posts.
⚡ Coda Story has A Russian user looks inside TikTok’s propaganda-filled digital bubble: Natalia has two phones: a Russian one and a British one. Although she is physically in Russia, she is able to make videos in English and post them using her British account and phone. She still uses her Russian account to check her timeline.
⚡ And here is a quick Fact-check: Is viral TikTok of Russian warship exploding? Quote: This video does not show the Moskva warship exploding – it's a 2013 Norwegian military exercise.
⚡ Ciarán O'Connor with a quick update on RU state-controlled news orgs that have been blocked in EU: These account are now banned on TikTok for UK users too. They're still available in the US.
⏲️ How long is too short
TikTok has expanded the max max video length to 10 minutes and started to roll out the functionality at the end of February 2022 (Techcrunch). According to Terry Nguyen the hottest trend on TikTok these days is in-depth analysis (#78). Quote: These “analysis creators” are a marked departure from the earliest days of the app when content was short, simple, and straightforward.
Does this mean content on the platform will get longer in general? And what is the right video length for you? And your audience?
TikTok Wants Longer Videos—Whether You Like It or Not, reports Wired in February 2022. Quote: “In June 2020, a content playbook to teach organizations how to better use TikTok indicated videos lasting between 11 and 17 seconds worked best on TikTok. By November 2021, the optimal recommended video length had doubled to between 21 and 34 seconds”.
That is quite far away from 10 minutes. A length that is not yet adopted by e.g. german creators, as discussed on TikTok’s For You Fest Berlin, end of April (Onlinemarketing.de). As alway it is a good idea to watch TikTok’s bigger sister, China’s Douyin. Douyin has a web-version that relies on horizontal videos and offers e.g shows that are ranging from 30 to 90 minutes. Or as Jing Daily puts it: Forget Short Video, “Medium-Form” Video is China’s Latest Brand Battleground.
Either way: Your attention sucks. And successful videos are more attention grabbing and faster than ever before, relying on layered storytelling and high density.
🔬 TikTok Research 2022
The International Communication Association (ICA) is an academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching and application of all aspects of human and mediated communication. The 72nd Annual ICA Conference will take place in Paris, May 26-30.
I started to see announcements and checked the entire programme looking for TikTok. Here are some of the nearly 40 TikTok paper presentations i’d really love to see:
🔬 Russian Encounters in the TikTok-Sphere – this paper considers this specific example of public reaction on TikTok to assess the conditions of the Russian political-communicative ecosystem.
🔬 Shaping TikTok as a Political Space: Influencers' Self-Perception and Their Interplay With Other Technical and Social Actors in Constructing the Public Sphere
🔬 Computational Approaches to Understanding Credibility in Video-Based Misinformation – This paper therefore analyze short-video misinformation with a multimodal lens, to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the features and strategies of video-based misinformation.
🔬 Metajournalistic Discourses on TikTok – On TikTok, many journalists are transforming their journalistic content into appealing cultural productions.
One of the key problems for TikTok (and other platform) researchers is the access to data. Until now TikTok is basically a black box. The Verge had an article this week with a headline suited to let every researcher’s heart bump. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube may finally have to start sharing data with researchers. Besides a US senate hearing it tackles the European Digital Service Act. If you want to read an in-depth analysis, i recommend: Platform research access in Article 31 of the Digital Services Act (Verfassungsblog).
More
🇵🇭 The 2022 Philippine presidential and vice presidential elections are scheduled to be held on Monday, May 9, 2022. Among the candidates is Bongbong Marcos – only son of former president, dictator, and kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and former first lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos. He is about to rewrite history on TikTok in his bid to become the Philippines’ next president (Time, LA Times).
🎓 Do you need a degree to become an influencer? Well, colleges are launching TikTok classes (Bloomberg), while these kids are skipping college to be TikTok famous (Vice).
👔 TikTok’s work culture does not seem to be the best. Anxiety, Secrecy and Relentless Pressure, reports WSJ.
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