Irish Times: TikTok discovers ‘covert influence operation’ targeting Ireland. “Video-sharing service TikTok dismantled a ‘covert influence operation’ network dedicated to targeting users in Ireland with ‘divisive’ content to “intensify social conflict”, the company has disclosed. The influence network was made up of 72 accounts that together had a following of some 94,743 users, and was shut down earlier this year.”
Wall Street Journal: TikTok Employees Say Executive Moves to U.S. Show China Parent’s Influence. “TikTok has spent the past three years trying to convince U.S. lawmakers it can operate independently in this country from its China-based parent company, ByteDance. After recent personnel moves, some employees aren’t so sure. Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the U.S. from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.”
Bloomberg: TikTok’s Rules Deter Researchers From Crunching Data on Users, Misinformation. “As TikTok gets more popular, researchers at leading academic institutions want to study what users are doing there. Publicly, the company says it’s open to this, and is partnering with academics. But researchers said so far, the video app’s rules about data are too burdensome.”
Hell Gate: The TikTok NPC Streamers of SoHo . “People attuned to the summer’s internet fads would have known what the brothers were doing—the Flints are NPC streamers, a genre in which a content creator will mimic a non-player character in a video game. During their livestreams, these content creators idle like a background villager in an Elder Scrolls town would, until a viewer interacts with them by throwing them a virtual token via TikTok’s reward system, in which case they’ll perform a line of dialogue and one of the animations they’ve come up with for their character.”
Wall Street Journal: People Are Streaming Pirated Movies on TikTok, One Short Clip at a Time. “Accounts on the platform are posting episodes of TV shows and full-length films in bite-sized clips that users can watch in a long continuous string. If you search for ‘Barbie,’ odds are, you’ll be inundated with fan videos and chatter, and won’t see any of the clips. But TikTok’s algorithms might promote a 90-second snippet of the movie on users’ For You pages, with a cryptic title like Part 8. Once users watch a few clips, more and more might turn up.”
TechCrunch: TikTok debuts new tools and technology to label AI content. “As more creators turn to AI for their artistic expression, there’s also a broader push for transparency around when AI was involved in content creation. To address this concern, TikTok announced today it will launch a new tool that will allow creators to label their AI-generated content and will begin testing other ways to label AI-generated content automatically.”
Bleeping Computer: TikTok flooded by ‘Elon Musk’ cryptocurrency giveaway scams. “TikTok is flooded by a surge of fake cryptocurrency giveaways posted to the video-sharing platform, with almost all of the videos pretending to be themes based on Elon Musk, Tesla, or SpaceX.”
Search Engine Land: TikTok quietly adds Wikipedia snippets to its search results. “TikTok now serves Wikipedia snippets in some of its search results. This is the first time that the platform has offered its users results from the wider web as historically, it exclusively featured its own content in SERPs.”
TechCrunch: TikTok fined $379M in EU for failing to keep kids’ data safe. “It’s been a long time coming but TikTok has finally been found in breach of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in relation to its handling of children’s data. Under the decision issued today by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), the video sharing platform has been reprimanded and fined €345 million (~$379 million). It has also been ordered to bring its offending data processing into compliance within three months.”
Engadget: Billboard’s latest top 50 chart pulls the biggest tracks from TikTok. “TikTok and Billboard are collaborating on a pop music chart. TikTok Billboard Top 50 Chart is a new weekly roundup listing the most popular songs on the social platform in the US. The list debuts with the track ‘SkeeYee’ by Sexyy Red taking the inaugural top spot.”
New York Times: TikTok Rankles Employees With Return-to-Office Tracking Tools. “TikTok employees in the United States expressed frustration and dismay this week after the company introduced a tool for tracking office attendance and threatened disciplinary action for failing to comply with new in-person mandates, in an unusual effort to get workers back into the office with custom data-collection technology.”
Business Tech (South Africa): South Africa launches major investigation into Google, Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT. “The Competition Commission has published the final terms of reference for its Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry, which aims to sniff out imbalances and competition issues related to dominant news aggregators and local South African media publications. According to the commission, the inquiry is specifically looking at the growing imbalance between news publishers in South Africa and large platforms like Google, Facebook and Apple, which take extracts of copyrighted work and place them on aggregated news feeds.”
The Verge: TikTok accidentally blocked Hollywood writers strike videos while casting a QAnon net. “TikTok videos about the Hollywood writers strike were temporarily blocked as the platform attempted to moderate QAnon conspiracy theories. Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media research group, reported today that TikTok users were unable to search for content related to the Writers Guild of America strike.”
The Verge: VPNs, Verizon, and Instagram Reels: how students are getting around the TikTok ban. “Some of the restrictions, such as the one Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed a few months ago, are far-reaching, stipulating broadly that TikTok may not operate within the state. That law is set to take effect next year. But for most — Texas included — the restrictions extend merely to government entities. Agencies have been tasked with eliminating the use of the platform on state-issued devices (as well as personal devices used for state business) and Wi-Fi networks. Those agencies include state universities.”
South China Morning Post: TikTok’s new Amazon copycat ‘Shop’, now live in the US, full of cheap Chinese goods. “Many of the listings mention being shipped from China, where TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is based. That could reignite US regulatory concerns if it puts user data in the hands of Chinese sellers. TikTok Shop will be competing with Amazon to sell a target of US$20 billion in merchandise this year, Bloomberg has reported.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.