Factual Dispatch #36: Tik Tok Don't Stop

The video-first social network & its implications are something new all together.

October 04, 2019

Now that Tik Tok has claimed 1.5% of worldwide mobile traffic, can be seen in the Top 15 for worldwide usage, even people older than Zoomers have started paying attention. Tik Tok’s corporate master, Bytedance is largely expected to be profitable in this Q3/4 2019, which is showing strong growth and smart marketing across a few of its properties. This has led to The New Yorker writing long-form articles about it, which saves me the trouble of researching this:

TikTok has been downloaded more than a billion times since its launch, in 2017, and reportedly has more monthly users than Twitter or Snapchat. Like those apps, it’s free, and peppered with advertising. I downloaded TikTok in May, adding its neon-shaded music-note logo to the array of app icons on my phone. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, which, in recent years, has invested heavily and made major advances in artificial intelligence. After a three-billion-dollar investment from the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, last fall, ByteDance was valued at more than seventy-five billion dollars, the highest valuation for any startup in the world.

To understand why Tik Tok has become so interesting, let’s contrast it with a “feed” people are more familiar with, like Facebook’s. The way the feed is usually constructed is a mix of things you do follow, with brands or pages you don’t follow, paying their way onto it. Twitter is a little different where things that “go viral” might end up getting shared onto people’s feeds even if they don’t follow that person. Instagram further complicates things, with its emphasis on topic based hashtags (Twitter uses hashtags for news/information dissemination purposes, and Facebook has no idea what it’s doing with hashtags) and aesthetic/meme communities. Tik Tok does what Instagram does, combined with what Twitter does, with a dash of what Vine did on top.

“If Instagram Stories and Vine had a baby and then infused it with music, that’s TikTok.”

Lil Nas X got mega-super famous using the Tik Tok structure to push snippets of his song. These “sounds,” which can be anything from song snippets, custom creations, or other recordings form the backbone of the short movie. Most introductory entries to Tik Tok usually then revolve around lip-sync’ing, performing, or otherwise hamming it up for the world.

As you can imagine, trending dances, sounds, and even branded challenges followed immediately. Imagine if the ice bucket challenge, Harlem Shake, plus those breakdancing videos your raver friend posts, had a home and that home smelled strongly of Vine. While this all just seems like Vine 2.0, what sets Tik Tok apart is its “For You” feed. Tik Tok claims this feed is optimized with “machine learning” which gets better at serving you content you would like, based on what you watch and how you use the app.

Much of Tik Tok’s success lies in how it seems possible to go from unknown with no followers, to viral across the globe. The “For You” feed is what makes that possible. That feed serves up content that might have been created by a huge star or a tiny newcomer, and gives the newcomer the same chance to “go viral.” Without it, the app would have languished, faced with the same problems all non-Facebook social networks face, difficulty in feeling good about putting labor or marketing spend into it if you suck at it or have no followers. Returning to that New Yorker article, this is the best way I’ve heard the difference described:

This feedback loop, called the “virtuous cycle of A.I.,” is what each TikTok user experiences in miniature. The company would not comment on the details of its recommendation algorithm, but ByteDance has touted its research into computer vision, a process that involves extracting and classifying visual information; on the Web site of its research lab, the company lists “short video recommendation system” among the applications of the computer-vision technology that it’s developing. Although TikTok’s algorithm likely relies in part, as other systems do, on user history and video-engagement patterns, the app seems remarkably attuned to a person’s unarticulated interests. Some social algorithms are like bossy waiters: they solicit your preferences and then recommend a menu. TikTok orders you dinner by watching you look at food.

For everyone who has worked in tech or generally doesn’t trust algorithmic choice, you can already start to see where this is going. While Tik Tok is described as definitively an American company, with servers hosted in the USA and all of the other usual corporate hand wavy reassurance, Bytedance is a formidable corporation. Tik Tok’s “Chinese equivalent” is named Douyin and it’s being used in silent, dangerous protest by Uighurs, with Douyin complying with CCP demanded tracking and censorship behind the Great Firewall.

Bytedance and Tik Tok were pestered admirably by the Washington Post to explain why videos of the protests in Hong Kong were almost totally absent from the platform, while they’ve gone viral on every other network. As you guessed, they got more corporate hand-waving and no true details about how the ostensibly American company shields itself from the interests of its masters in Beijing and the CCP itself. Thankfully, someone leaked documents on exactly how Tik Tok is censored were leaked to the Guardian.

The guidelines divide banned material into two categories: some content is marked as a “violation”, which sees it deleted from the site entirely, and can lead to a user being banned from the service. But lesser infringements are marked as “visible to self”, which leaves the content up but limits its distribution through TikTok’s algorithmically-curated feed.

In context of the other feeds, it’s easy to see why this type of model would be more acceptable to consumers than Twitter’s banhammer or Facebook’s faceless/appeal-less action teams. It allows the team producing the algorithm to both blame it for problematic commentary or videos from non-important users to not see the wide exposure. Repeatedly banning content gets people to leave the platform, while seeing your friends go viral just motivates you to post harder.

Once this story broke, Tik Tok pivoted and said that those documents were outdated, and they had moved away from those to new, improved, local guidelines, that allowed teams on the ground in many countries to be more sensitive to the political and digital climates of non-Chinese countries. Which, turned out to be, diabolical:

The other was a set of guidelines for individual countries, which introduced new rules to deal with specific local controversies – but also further restricted what can be shown. For instance, the Guardian has seen Turkey-specific guidelines in which TikTok explicitly banned a swathe of content related to Kurdish separatism, and adds the country’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to the list of political leaders who cannot be criticised, defamed or spoofed on the platform.

And an entire section of the rules was devoted to censoring depictions of homosexuality. “Intimate activities (holding hands, touching, kissing) between homosexual lovers” were censored, as were “reports of homosexual groups, including news, characters, music, tv show, pictures”. Similarly blocked was content about “protecting rights of homosexuals (parade, slogan, etc.)” and “promotion of homosexuality”. In all those gudelines, TikTok went substantially further than required by law.

We can all see where this goes. The fastest growing social networks, super popular with teens around the world, the one with gigantic problems surrounding data collection from children under the age of 13, has a “magical AI system” that somehow serves up country-specific, government-approved, revolution-free, addictive-as-fuck content. Who also make it super easy for brands to insert themselves into challenges and trending topics, while already starting to fend off calls for transparency. Its announcement yesterday that it won’t be allowing “political ads” on the platform both keeps them from having to develop an ad-purchaser identity verification program, and remains on-message for them as they try to pivot away from the increasingly caustic environments other social networks have become. However, the idea that political ads are the only way autocrats, intelligence services, or rogue fake news creators use these platforms is myopic at best and actively beneficial to the CCP at worst.

For all the parents out there, I’m not sure this is a call to take the app of your pre-teen’s phones, but I do want to note that this form of dry censorship and wild virality potential is an odd environment for a developing brain. I may not care about getting a squillion likes after going viral worldwide because someone really liked my BTS lip-sync tribute video. But your teen might, and we have no idea how their messaging is being shaped on the platform. What we know, we know because of the press. I assume there’s a lot more there there.

Eye-watering Data Visualization of the Week: Our Extremely Online President:

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: Ecuador’s governmental data leak was straight out of a Gibson novel, and Tibetan activists have been targeted with WhatsApp delivered 1-click mobile exploits for a depressing amount of time now. 

Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: Limiting message forwarding helps stem the tide of misinformation, as limiting message forwarding in India proved.

“Huh, Interesting” Read of the Week: You get what you measure, and when it comes to the family that married and divorced 23 times to scam the local government out of apartments, you get ONLY what you measure.

Royal Sampler

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A German radar vendor said it tracked our untrackable stealth jet, the F-35. From a pony farm.

As Big Tech focuses on problems instead of Problems, it appears the rate of innovation and research breakthrough velocity, is slowing. #MakeResearchFundingGreatAgain

In case you weren’t absolutely sure, The Cut talked to people who came out against abusers and harassers at the peak of the #MeToo era. It went as badly for them as every woman you know probably could have told you it was going to go. 

Sparta is a myth, invented to sell aspirational stupid masculinity, and it’s a toxic one at that.

Scott Galloway of NYU & Section 4 makes the extremely correct point that it’s not just the CEO of WeWork and the kingmakers at Softbank who fucked this up, the board was along for the ride. So at what point does this go from incompetence to fraud? 

Dunk of the Week: Nothing new under the sun.

If we’re going to have season changes announced by cataclysmic storms now, it’s going to be weird explaining to small children what the world was like before the Fall Floods or the Spring Scorches.

T 

P.S. Here are some Goose memes, because Untitled Goose Game is wonderful.