#BYTEDANCE

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

#pluralistic #Lauren Leffer #tiktok #surplus allocation #fauximation #potemkin ai #the algorithm #creative labor #algorithms exposed #enshittification #bytedance #giant teddy bears #convincers #big store con #pivot to video #scissor bucket #Emily Baker-White

[alwaysbewoke]

#lmao #lol #tiktok #national security #chinese spy #byteDance #espionage #data privacy #cybersecurity #congressional hearings #china-us relations #social media #misinformation #manipulation #intelligence agencies #hypothetical threat #chinese government #user data privacy #tiktok ownership #foreign influence #online surveillance #misinformation campaign

[william-r-melich]

Tik Tok Bill/HR 7521 - 06/16/2024

Bill HR 7521 passed 3 days ago in the house of representatives by a vote of 352 - 65. If this bill passes in the Senate, which looks likely, Joe Biden said he will sign it, which will purportedly ban Tik Tok. It wouldn't really ban it, but what it will do is force Byte Dance, the Chinese company that owns Tik Tok, to divest by providing a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divesture. In other words, they would have to sell it. They would also have to shut down their internet hosting service. Someone in the U.S. would buy it. I've been on the fence with this one as well with whether or not Biden will remain on the ticket. After reading a portion of the bill I saw a loophole regarding what can be done with a foreign person. Donald Trump, who back in 2020 wanted to ban Tik Tok, he's now against banning it. He said that banning Tik Tok would give the government too much power and would make Facebook more of a monopoly. I sure hope his 180-degree shift wasn't partly made because he has a big campaign donor from Tik Tok. Elon Musk is against it. He thinks it will lead to the government having too much control of wording and censorship on all media platforms. He argues that it doesn't just involve foreign adversaries. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie on X posted this: "The president will be given the power to ban WEB SITES, not just Apps.--"The person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S. (or offshore) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE or App Store, not the 'foreign adversary.' " The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) controls what content is allowed on Tik Toc, and the version that is used in China is very different to what's allowed on it outside of China, like here in the U.S. In China they're teaching their children strict discipline and loyalty to the CCP without other harmful content, brainwashing them into their collectivist ideologies. Outside of China they are allowing and promoting content that encourages self-harm and suicide. The big concern in Congress is that the CCP is using the platform to collect as much personal data as they can to be later used against us for nefarious reasons.

Bytedance is the parent company running Tik Toc, and it's former CEO, Zhang Yiming, in 2018 wrote an open public letter of apology to the CCP's headquarters. He was in trouble for not directing his tech companies to push the party's communist agenda far enough, including for what they termed as Xi Jinping thought. Here's some of that letter translated in English:

"I sincerely apologize to regulators, our users and colleagues. I have been in a state of guilt and remorse since I received the notice from the regulatory authority yesterday afternoon and stayed up all night."

"Toutino will permanently shut down the app and the Wechat account of Neihan Duanzi. The product has gone astray, posting content that goes against socialist core values. It's all on me. I accept all the punishment since it failed to direct public opinion in the right way."

"I blame myself for failing to live up to the guidance and expectations of the authorities. In the past few years, the authorities have given us a lot of guidance and help, but I failed to understand properly and to correct properly in the past that resulted in the repercussions today."

"I blame myself for failing the support and trust of our users. We one-sidedly focused on growth and scale without paying timely attention to quality and responsibility of guiding users to obtain positive information. We have failed to undertake corporate social responsibility, and lack emphasis and understanding of our roles in carry forward the positive energy, and guide public opinion properly."

"I reflect that the deep-seated problems for the company are: a weak understanding of the 'four consciousness,' a lack of socialist core values, and a biased guidance of public opinion. 'In the past, we have placed too much emphasis on the role of technology, and failed to realize that socialist core values are the prerequisite to technology. We need to spread positive messages in line with the requirements of the times while respecting public order and good practice.' "

The "four consciousness," to which he referred is described in the following CCP directive as translated into English; CCP Central Committee Publishers Plan for Deepening the Reform of Party and State Agencies. March 18, 2021:

"To deepen reform of the Party and state agencies at this new historical turning point, we must comprehensively implement the Spirit of the 19th Party Congress and persist in taking Marxism -- Leninism, Ma Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Important Thinking of the 'Three Represents,' the Scientific Development Concept, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the guide. We must firmly establish political consciousness, consciousness of the big picture, consciousness of the core leadership, and consciousness of falling in line with party directives. We must resolutely maintain the authority and centralized unified leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core. We must adapt to the development requirements of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, persist in the general principle of seeking progress while maintaining stability, and adhere to the proper direction of reform. We must persist in being people-centered, and persist in comprehensively ruling the country according to law."

It seems clear to me that the CCP wants to dominate the world and control how everyone thinks. We can't let that happen. The harmful content on Tik Tok can be found on some of the other platforms, but apparently on Tik Tok it's been more harmful and addictive to kids. Amnesty International 2 reports: "Driven into the Darkness: How Tik Tok Encourages Self-harm and Suicidal Ideation and the I Feel Exposed: Caught in Tik Tok's Surveillance Web - highlight the abuses experienced by children and young people using Tik Tok Outside of China. Between 3 and 20 minutes into our manual research, more than half of the videos in the 'For You' feed were related to mental health struggles with multiple recommended videos in a single hour romanticizing, normalizing or encouraging suicide."

Here's how a portion of the Tik Tok bill reads - HR 7521:

(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or (B) a covered company that -- (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of -- (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annes and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divesture. (4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY, -- The term "foreign adversary country" means a country specified with respect to a covered company or other entity is -- (A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country. (B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in "subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or (C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) (B). (2) Covered Company -- (A) IN GENERAL -- The term "covered company" means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, or augmented or immersive technology application.

The loophole I see is that there are people here from China that are legal to work and live here (green card) and who have a residence in China. The President (Joe Biden) could divest any website or app operated by a company with such a person in its employ from China with a green card who happens to own at least 20% of that company. I haven't read through the entire bill, nor am I an expert on Congressional bills or policies, but there might be other loopholes to be found. Given all that I have considered on this, I think divesting Tik Tok is a good idea, but only with no loopholes or wiggle room. I don't trust the government, their too giddy about this and I suspect they may have something up their sleeves. Next to our own ability to destroy ourselves from within, I think China is our biggest threat. This is serious stuff and we're in some very dangerous situations. We've got to get this right and get the right leader in the White House, which, in my humble opinion, is Donald J. Trump.

#trump #donald trump #tik tok #tiktok #china #bytedance #congress #state #hr 7521 #foreign adversary #national security #joe biden #biden #xi jinping #marxism #socialism #communism #marxism leninism #leninism #party #ma zedong #thought #xiaoping theory #4 consciousness #ccp #ccp directive #collectivism #social media platforms #elon musk #website

[ophilosoraptoro]

#tiktok #china #deep state #israel #palestine #communist propaganda #communism #CCP #propaganda #zionism #zionist propaganda #bytedance #ADL #harvard university #congress #internet #free speech #censorship

[searchsystem]

A Black Cover Design (ABCD) / ByteDance / Dali Smart / Packaging / 2020

#a black cover design #abcd #bytedance #dali smart #packaging #2020 #symbol #typography

[nickgerlich]

Pump It Up

Quick. Name a social media platform that has been outlawed in numerous states. Now name a social media platform that is doing everything it can to promote its ubiquity. If you answered “TikTok” to both challenges, you would be right.



Never before in the short history of social media has one platform been so singled out as TikTok. As of April, 34 out of 50 states have banned its use among state employees. Montana has gone so far as to ban it completely for anyone and everyone, so please don’t think of visiting the Treasure State and posting your reels. You may just be fined.

Of course, Montana is going to face huge legal challenges on this one. And never mind that you could probably dodge their bullet by using a VPN on your phone. It’s little different from dealing with the Chinese firewall.

ICYMI, the controversy is over the fact that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company with rumored ties to the Communist Party there. That’s code for saying TikTok may be a national security risk, even if you’re just posting reels of your dog doing tricks.

To combat this, ByteDance will more than gladly take on legal challenges, as well as bolster its presence everywhere, like at the gas pump. Remember when we were told not to use our phones while fueling because we night cause an explosion? Yeah. Apparently that’s a non-starter these days, because TikTok has partnered with GSTV (Gas Station TV) to launch new videos we can watch during the five minutes we’re left checking our email and socials anyway. QR codes and a call to action seek to bring viewers into not just TikTok, but the brands paying to advertise there.

And it is pure genius, security risks or not. I bet the other social media platforms are kicking themselves for not jumping on this one. Think about it. When else do we all have a short amount of dead time that could otherwise be used for marketing purposes? This is the kind of thinking from the old days (meaning before COVID) that airlines followed with their in-flight magazines, as well as SKyMall catalogs. Those days were even better, because they had captive audiences locked into their seats for sometimes hours at a time.

The GSTV ads are 20 seconds, even shorter than the reels we see on TikTok. GSTV claims 116 million unique viewers each month, which speaks to the appeal of their platform. The ability to share these adverts makes them worth even more, because they can now reach even more eyeballs.

The strategy is nothing new for TikTok, which has also inked deals with Reach TV for airports, and Screenvision inside movie theatres. The goal is to be even more ubiquitous than Facebook, Google, or any of the other major ad-supported platforms.

Now let’s think about some applications. While virtually anything could be promoted at the pump, including simply planting seeds for products that might be purchased much later, I see great potential for items that could be sold in the next few minutes. Imagine the fast food joint next door promoting a meal deal, or a nearby bar advertising its Happy Hour.

Think about it. You’re already out in your car, and you use it to convey a quick and easy purchase, which may or may not have been planned. In some cases, it could divert you; in others, it could be a speed bump that interrupts whatever it is you are doing.

The major limitation to this method—which is good but not perfect—is that we do not purchase gasoline on a daily basis, unless you happen to drive 300-400 miles a day. Travelers along the freeway are one thing, but locals are probably not going to hit the gas station more than once a week, and maybe even less, depending upon the daily commute.

Still, I commend TikTok for finding new ways to spread its wings, because given the current state of affairs at the state and federal level, they should be nervous—and they are. While I hate the notion of a US firewall blocking selected sites, it is a possibility. It would be unprecedented—and I promised never to use that word after the pandemic and all its unprecedentedness—but stranger things have happened.

Meanwhile, fill ‘er up and look for these screens at the pump. They’re calling your name.

Dr “Sell Me Something Good” Gerlich

Audio Blog

#marketing #TikTok #ByteDance #GSTV #social media #advertising

[geezerwench]

The RESTRICT Act in the US is NOT about TikTok or the parent company ByteDance. That's the cover. 

The RESTRICT ACT allows the Secretary of Commerce to decide if another country is a foreign adversary and can then put us in a cyber war with that country or regime.

@pearlmania500 on TikTok

#Restrict Act #ban TikTok #tiktok #bytedance #china #secretary of commerce #politics #us politics #tiktok ban #pearlmania500

[appgrowing]

New Open World Game Topped Pre-registration, Another Masterpiece by Nuverse

Recently, many new games from leading developers have gone on an advertising spree. In addition to Moonton's Watcher Of Realms, according to AppGrowing, Nuverse's Dragonheir: Silent Gods started a massive advertising campaign, topped the Google Play Pre-registration, and became a Top 5 game among loads of games that are already released by top Chinese developers.

Source: AppGrowing

Dragonheir: Silent Gods is about to be launched  in September 2023, according to data.ai. After the release of the global version of Earth: Revival（《星球：重啟》） in February, Dragonheir: Silent Gods will be the second Nuverse game to be available worldwide this year, carrying the company's expectation of building a global brand.

01 An Open-world TRPG on 5-Year Development and $15 M

Dragonheir: Silent Gods is a D&D open-world semi-real-time strategy RPG. It is said to have taken five years to develop and cost over $15 million, making it the most "heavyweight" of the known Nuverse games.

In terms of art, Dragonheir: Silent Gods combines vintage oil painting with the widely accepted dark western fantasy style, differentiating it from the "cartoonish" games of the same genre. Delicate character and scene modeling make the game looks sophisticated.

Image Credit: Dragonheir: Silent Gods

Of course, in the case of the increasingly competitive game market, "appearance" alone is not enough to attract players. Officially, the game story text is now approaching 1 million words, and all the dialogue is in English voice-over, including the invited DND series "Critical Role" voice actor Mathew Mercer. Moreover, with the support of high-level music, Dragonheir: Silent Gods tries to revive the D&D-style fantasy world in all aspects.

Along with the vast worldview and plot, the main selling point of Dragonheir: Silent Gods is the "open world adventure" gameplay. Players can freely explore the game world, collect resources, solve challenges, and learn about the characters‘ stories.

Dragonheir: Silent Gods has little innovation in combat. The game adopts a normal turn-based model, incorporating auto chess gameplay to enhance strategy. Players select characters to arrange a team of 5 to fight, and there is a common TRPG "dice throwing" in the process.

Similar to Earth: Revival, Dragonheir: Silent Gods will be released on multiple platforms. According to the official website, the game will not only be available on the mobile platform of App Store and Google Play but also on Steam.

02 Advertising Strategy of Dragonheir: Silent Gods

According to AppGrowing, Dragonheir: Silent Gods began advertising on May 24, which coincides with the opening of the game's PC and Android beta test in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan of China.

Source: AppGrowing

In terms of media, Dragonheir: Silent Gods mainly invested in Meta Audience Network, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook, and the share of each is relatively average. Its target markets are in Europe and America. The ad format of the game is mainly in-feed, while creatives are mostly horizontal (including square) videos.

Source: AppGrowing

The creatives of Dragonheir: Silent Gods focus on the content of the game itself and did not go too far, probably because it is still in the early pre-registration advertising stage.

Showing World View & Scenes

DND theme is appealing enough for European and American players. Dragonheir: Silent Gods focuses on the abundant and detailed surroundings in the video, labeling the game as "high quality" and attracting players interested in the genre.

Some creatives also combine the exploration gameplay. For example, the following video shows the beautiful scenes of several maps through "team exploration".

Showing Characters

Characters have always been one of the promotional methods for RPG games. Dragonheir: Silent Gods stated that the number of heroes and NPCs in the game has exceeded 200, and the content is also used in ad creatives.

For example, this video shows the character's exquisite modeling at the beginning, and then turns to its combat skills, maximizing the audience's understanding of the character.

In addition to the direct display of characters, Dragonheir: Silent Gods also released many "character customization" ads. Besides the presets, the game supports a variety of detailed numerical adjustments, with a quality beyond the normal brutal character customization. It even shows the common "property points" of TRPG, highlighting the game's unique features.

From the advertising point of view, such character customization videos are mostly used for MMO games, which can capture a wide range of players. It may drive Dragonheir: Silent Gods to broaden its target audience.

Showing Strategy Gameplay

Dragonheir: Silent Gods has created ads showing the strategic gameplay. For example, this creative shows the animation effect of characters coming on the battlefield and discharging their skills in turn. Elements such as kill clears and blast damage figures highlight the excitement of the fight and attract users interested in this kind of gameplay.

Generally speaking, the current creatives of Dragonheir: Silent Gods revolve around the three major directions of game art, characters and gameplay to do simple display, and the entire idea is rather restrained, more to advertise as an auxiliary means of brand exposure. But considering the various ads of Earth: Revival after its launch, perhaps we will see more interesting ad creatives when Dragonheir: Silent Gods is officially released.

03 Will it be "the Year of Game" for Nuverse?

Entering 2023, Nuverse has announced three games, the globally released Earth: Revival, Dragonheir: Silent Gods in pre-registration, and CoA（《晶核》）, which is aimed at Mainland China and will be released on July 14. These three are different in art style and gameplay, but all present a high quality. Earth: Revival performed well in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan of China, having taken the Top 2 in Taiwan iOS Top Grossing games. It was launched in Japan in April and once entered the Top 30 of the iOS Top Grossing games. The anime-style ARPG CoA have exceeded 9 million pre-registrations, according to the official website.

From the establishment of the Game Department in 2018, ByteDance has been exploring the game development for the past 5 years. Although there have been news of studio dissolution and project cancellation, Nuverse has done a lot of work, especially in mid core & hard core games, and some of them performed excellently. For example, the female-oriented game Flower Ariel (《花亦山心之月》)  and the Earth: Revival that confronted with Tencent and NetEase in the theme of doomsday survival.

The exposure of 3 new games in 2023 H1 reveals a clear increase in Nuverse's game productivity and self-development strength. Whether ByteDance's mid core & hard core games can gain more achievement this year is up to the performance of Dragonheir: Silent Gods and CoA.

*The content and media in this article are protected by copyright laws. Some information is cited from public sources for illustrative purposes only, with ownership retained by the original authors. This article provides general information only and is not meant as opinion or advice for specific situations.

Follow AppGrowing's social media accounts or register immediately at AppGrowing to learn more mobile advertising insights.

LinkedIn: @AppGrowing

Twitter:@AppGrowing

Facebook: @AppGrowing

#mobile games #mobile game marketing #mobilegamedevelopment #digital marketing #bytedance #open world #new game! #Youtube

[memenewsdotcom]

Montana votes to ban TikTok

View On WordPress

#America #Android #apple #bytedance #china #free speech #government #information #meme #memes #Montana #news #smartphone #social media #tech #technology #TikTok #united states

[toposla]

ByteDance’s newest regional headquarters. Design by @toposla lead designer Yi Zhu. A key hub connecting a Cultural Arts Center, Sports Center and Binbei Super Headquarters. Specialized landscape designs uniquely serve office, retail, hotel, and residential uses, facilitating engagement and innovation. @tiktok A contemporary urban forest envelops the core area, defining a "clearing" where primary activities take place. A dramatic arrival experience allows pedestrians to pass through and under the peaceful forest at the edges and enter the active central spaces. #landscapearchitecture #landscapearchitect #landscapedesign #landscapedesigner #landscape_lovers #garden #gardendesign #toposdesign #yizhudesign #tiktok #mixedusedevelopment #xiamen #bytedance #everydayurbanism #landscapeurbanism https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm1bprcPAvG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#landscapearchitecture #landscapearchitect #landscapedesign #landscapedesigner #landscape_lovers #garden #gardendesign #toposdesign #yizhudesign #tiktok #mixedusedevelopment #xiamen #bytedance #everydayurbanism #landscapeurbanism

[mostlysignssomeportents]

We should ban TikTok('s surveillance)

With the RESTRICT Act, Congress is proposing to continue Trump’s war on Tiktok, enacting a US ban on the Chinese-owned service. How will they do this? Congress isn’t clear. In practice, banning stuff on the internet is hard, especially if you don’t have a national firewall:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

My guess is that they’re thinking of ordering the mobile duopoly of Google and Apple to nuke the Tiktok app from their app stores. That’s how they do it in China, after all: when China wanted to ban VPNs and other privacy tools, they just ordered Apple to remove them from the App Store, and Apple rolled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

That’s the completely foreseeable consequence of arrogating the power to decide which software every mobile user on earth is entitled to use — as Google and Apple have done. Once you put that gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, you damn betcha that some strong-man backed by a powerful state is going to come along and shoot it by Act III.

The same goes for commercial surveillance: once you collect massive, nonconsensual dossiers on every technology user alive, you don’t get to act surprised when cops and spies show up and order your company to serve as deputies for a massive, off-the-books warrantless surveillance project.

Hell, a cynic might even say that commercial surveillance companies are betting on this. The surveillance public-private partnership is a vicious cycle: corporations let cops and spies plunder our data; then the cops and spies lobby against privacy laws that would prevent these corporations from spying on us:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

Which makes the RESTRICT Act an especially foolish project. If the Chinese state wants to procure data on Americans, it need not convince us to install Tiktok. It can simply plunk down a credit card with any of the many unregulated data-brokers who feed the American tech giants the dossiers that the NSA and local cops rely on.

Every American tech giant is at least as bad for privacy as Tiktok is — yes, even Apple. Sure, Apple lets its users block Facebook spying with a single tap — but even if you opt out of “tracking,” Apple still secretly gathers exactly the same kinds of data as Facebook, and uses it to power its own ad product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

There is no such thing as a privacy-respecting tech giant. Long before Apple plastered our cities with lying billboards proclaiming its reverence for privacy, Microsoft positioned itself as the non-spying alternative to Google, which would be great, except Microsoft spies on hundreds of millions of people and sells the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Tech’s surveillance addiction means that Tiktok’s own alternative to the RESTRICT Act is also unbelievably stupid. The company has proposed to put itself under Oracle’s supervision, letting Oracle host its data and audit its code. You know, Oracle, the company that built the Great Firewall of China 1.0:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveillance

We should not trust Tiktok any more than we trust Apple, Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Tiktok lied about whether it was sending data to China before:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access

And even if it keeps its promise not to send user data to China, that promise is meaningless — it can still send the vectors and models it creates with that data to China — these being far more useful for things like disinformation campaigns and population-scale inferences than the mere logs from your Tiktok sessions.

There are so many potentially harmful ways to process commercial surveillance data that trying to enumerate all the things that a corporation is allowed to do with the data it extracts from us is a fool’s errand. Instead, we should ban companies from spying on us, whether they are Chinese or American.

Corporations are remorseless, paperclip-maximizing colony organisms that perceive us as inconvenient gut-flora, and they lack any executive function (as do their “executives”), and they cannot self-regulate. To keep corporations from harming us, we must make it illegal for them to enact harm, and punish them when they break the law:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

After all, the problem with Tiktok isn’t the delightful videos or the fact that it’s teaching a generation of children to be expert sound- and video-editors. The problem with Tiktok is that it spies on us. Just like the problem with Facebook isn’t that it lets us communicate with our friends, and the problem with Google isn’t that it operates a search engine.

Now, these companies will tell you that the two can’t be separated, that a bearded prophet came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning, “Larry, Sergey, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles and, lo, thou wilt data-mine them for actionable market intelligence.” But it’s nonsense. Google ran for years without surveillance. Facebook billed itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace and promised never to spy on us:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

The inevitabilist narrative that says that corporations must violate our rights in order to make the products we love is unadulterated Mr Gotcha nonsense: “Yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent”:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Of course, corporations push this narrative all the time, which is why American Big Tech has been quietly supporting a ban on Tiktok, which (coincidentally) has managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise impregnable, decaying, enshittified oligarchy that US companies have created.

They have conspicuously failed to call for any kind of working solution, like a federal privacy law that would ban commercial surveillance, and extend a “private right of action,” so people could sue tech giants and data-brokers who violated the law, without having to convince a regulator, DA or Attorney General to bestir themselves:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

Instead, the tech giants have the incredible gall to characterize themselves as the defenders of our privacy — at least, so long as the Chinese government is the adversary, and so long as its privacy violations come via an app, and not buy handing a credit card to the data-brokers that are the soil bacteria that keeps Big Tech’s ecosystem circulating. In the upside-down land of Big Tech lobbying, privacy is a benefit of monopoly — not something we have to smash monopolies to attain:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Not everyone in Congress is onboard with the RESTRICT Act. AOC has come out for a federal privacy law that applies to all companies, rather than a ban on an app that tens of millions of young Americans love:

https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-first-tiktok-congress-ban-without-being-clued-in-2023-3

You know who agrees with AOC? Rand Paul. Yes, that absolute piece of shit. Paul told his caucusmates in the GOP that banning an app that millions of young American voters love is bad electoral politics. This fact is so obvious that even Rand fucking Paul can understand it:

https://gizmodo.com/rand-paul-opposes-tiktok-ban-warns-republicans-1850278167

Paul is absolutely right to call a Tiktok ban a “national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation.” The Democrats should listen to him, because the GOP won’t. As between the two parties, the GOP is far more in thrall to the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the business lobby. They are never going to back a policy that’s as good for the people and as bad for big business as a federal privacy law.

The Democrats have the opportunity to position themselves as “the party that wants to keep Tiktok but force it to stop being creepy, along with all the other tech companies,” while the GOP positions itself as “the party of angry technophobes who want to make sure that any fun you have is closely monitored by Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pinchai and Tim Cook and their pale imitations of the things you love about Tiktok.”

That’s not just good electoral politics — it’s good policy. Young voters aren’t going to turn out to the polls for performative Cold War 2.0 nonsense, but they will be pissed as hell at whoever takes away their Tiktok.

And if you do care about Cold War 2.0, then you should be banning surveillance, not Tiktok; the Chinese government has plenty of US dollars at its disposal to spend in America’s freewheeling, unregulated data markets — as do criminals, petty and organized, and every other nation-state adversary of the USA.

The RESTRICT Act is a garbage law straight out of the Clinton era, a kind of King Canute decree that goes so far as to potentially prohibit the use of VPNs to circumvent its provisions. America doesn’t need a Great Firewall to keep itself safe from tech spying — it needs a privacy law.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A modified vintage editorial cartoon. Uncle Sam peeks out over a 'frowning battlement' whose cannon-slots are filled with telescopes from which peer the red glaring eyes of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Topping the battlements in a row are Uncle Sam and three business-suited figures with dollar-sign-bags for heads. The three dollar-bag men have corporate logos on their breasts: Facebook, Google, Apple. Standing on the strand below the battlements, peering up, is a forlorn figure with a Tiktok logo for a head. The fortress wall bears the words 'RESTRICT Act.']

#rand paul is right actually ugh ugh ugh #politics #oracle #restrict act #privacy #privacy without monopoly #tiktok #commercial surveillance #trade war #bytedance #apple #google #facebook #meta #usausausa #generational warfare #electoral strategy #pluralistic #aoc

[inbonobo]

So did anything (other than “we’re no longer doing it”) come out of #TikTok #surveillance of #Forbes and #BuzzFeed #journalists? #journos #journalism #freepress #masssurveillance #China #ByteDance #cpc (via EXCLUSIVE: TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists | Bombshell Breaking News, Yt)

#youtube #forbes #china #bytedance #buzzfeed #buzzfeed news #journalism #free press #freedom of the press #free speech

[mrblogjangles]

#ByteDance #Congress #DataPrivacy #HouseofRepresentatives #Security #TicToc #tictocban

[blaqsbi]

Post: TikToks Instagram competitor likely to be named TikTok Notes | TechCrunch https://www.blaqsbi.com/5OIe

#Apps #bytedance #Instagram #TikTok #TikTokPhotos

[ophilosoraptoro]

Temu Is a Total Rip-off

#temu #china #internet #politics #china uncensored #ip theft #fraud #economy #communism #pinduoduo #slave labor #customer service #amazon #pdd holdings inc #intellectual property #data privacy #bytedance #tiktok #malware #fast fashion #uighur #xinjiang

[nickgerlich]

When Life Hands You Lemons

The semester is starting to wind down these days, especially for my grad students, whose term lasts only 13 weeks. It may seem like it is long at times, but it really is fast. And like many other semesters before, we have been treated to some very newsworthy, sometimes amusing, other times anger-inspiring, events that cause us to stand up and pay attention.



Like the ongoing worries over TikTok and whether it should be banished not just in individual states and on their government-owned devices, but nationwide. Australia just announced its complete ban on government-owned devices. In the US, in a rather odd come-together moment for the Right and Left, there is momentum to ban it here as well.



It’s just that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has more ammo in its case. The top apps right now for lifestyle and video editing are owned by them: Lemon8 and CapCut. Take that, you pompous lawmakers. We’re not just going to roll over and die.



CapCut is a handy tool for creating the reels that users post to TikTok or elsewhere. I only learned about it this last weekend from my oldest daughter, who said that “everyone’s using it” at the digital marketing agency she calls her professional home. Me, I use Mojo, which, for all I know, could be owned by ByteDance as well. She says it is much better than Mojo. I messaged Oldest Daughter yesterday about CapCut’s owner, and I could almost hear her gulp all the way from Dallas.



And then there’s Lemon8, the new social media app that is designed to take on both Instagram and Pinterest. But in the case of Lemon8, it’s only new to the US. Launched in 2020 to little fanfare, ByteDance kept it in limited circulation until now.

And now we know why.

Lemon8 is not an exact Instagram clone, however, focusing—at least for now—on fashion, food, wellness, and travel, among other general interest topics. Like BeReal, it shuns pretense, and urges users not to stage photos like many we see on Insta. The site also encourages users to include direct links to where viewers can buy featured products.

My question now is whether a ban on TikTok would also include a ban on Lemon8 and CapCut. And even if it does, what’s to stop ByteDance from continuing to roll out new apps to dodge federal bullets? Will it boil down to banishing all Chinese-owned apps, like Pinduoduo and Shein? This could lead to war, you know.

Which makes me begin to wonder if all this pomp and circumstance, this drum-beating, is an exercise in futility. Short of erecting a massive firewall around us, like the Chinese do to keep out western media, there’s little that can be done. Worse yet, it leads to frustrations among the people, especially when we live in a place that espouses First Amendment rights and freedoms. Fire up the VPN, as I have said before, and hope you don’t get caught. I hear that Chinese citizens can be in serious trouble if they do so. The last thing we need is a similar clamp down.

The other part of me wonders how people can continue to absorb so many social media sites. I am not opposed to the development of new ones at all. It’s just that there are still only 24 hours in the day, and I have a hard enough time just attending to Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. I have work to do, you know. Heck, my LinkedIn looks like a ghost page. I guess if I were looking for a job, I’d hop on it.

All of which means we are continuing to slice the market into ever smaller pieces, and as long as it can be done profitably, new sites will continue to roll out. Stir on the controversy of Chinese ownership, and Ima gonna have things to write about for a long, long time.

Let the user beware. There may be someone in Beijing looking over your shoulder.

Dr “But Still I Must Check It Out“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

#marketing #Lemon8 #CapCut #ByteDance #socialmedia #apps