TikTok's official newsroom, which posts company statements on recommendations, moderation, data security, US ownership, legal disputes, and creator funds.
HN links it as the primary source for TikTok's own statements, such as how its recommendation algorithm works, its replies to Universal Music, and creator fund plans.
> So TikTok not only DID admit to have foreign access to US data, but also lied and denied previously about it then according to the leak in the Buzzfeed New article.
They never claimed their own employees didn't have access to the data. They claimed that access to the data was controlled and it was stored in data centres not subject to China's jurisdiction[0]:
> First, let's talk about data privacy and security. We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law. Further, we have a dedicated technical team focused on adhering to robust cybersecurity policies, and data privacy and security practices.
Furthermore, the Buzzfeed article acknowledges that the "foreign access" was typically in the service of restricting that access:
> In the recordings, the vast majority of situations where China-based staff accessed US user data were in service of Project Texas's aim to halt this data access.
The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad faith actor. They responded to concerns about data privacy by moving customer data from their own data centres to those of an American cloud provider and have shown that they're working to restrict access to that data further.
> This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before, rather than trying to evade responsibility and join…
Bytedance is incorporated in Caymen islands. Its not a Chinese owned corporation. It has subsidiary in HongKong, not mainland China. In fact, it does not have an legal entity in mainland China. Its has subsidiary in the U.S. that runs TikTok in California. The US subsidiary is managed by Americans and hires American workers. The CEO is Kevin Mayer. All TikTok's data is stored in the US, the content management and regulation team are all American employees. I know from TikTok employees that employees in Chinese office are not allowed to view U.S. stored data. The machine learning system for Tiktok and Chinese version douyin are separate. Tiktok is planning to allow outside security review of how they manage content and how the recommendation algorithm works. Legally, there is no way that Chinese laws have any jurisdiction on the U.S. subsidiary due to the fact that Bytedance is incorporated in Cayman islands. Bytedance's operations in China (Douyin and others) are managed by the Hongkong operating entity, and only these operations have to respect Chinese laws. If the Chinese government wants to get data from TikTok, the employees there can just deny them. What can the Chinese government do? Arrest them? They live in the US. Second, if Chinese government is forcing Tiktok to censor according to its own wishes, the American employees at Tiktok would have been talking by now. You think American employees would bend backwards for Chinese government?
Source: ByteDance coporeate…
The court must not have looked very hard.
"Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period. Our US moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our US policies – just like other US companies in our space. We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government; TikTok does not operate in China, nor do we have any intention of doing so in the future."
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/statement-on-tiktoks-content-moderation-and-data-security-practices/
"58. Have members of the Chinese Communist Party, or other members of the Chinese government, asked ByteDance or TikTok employees to heat content?
TikTok does not heat content in the U.S. at the request of any government, including the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok may promote or "heat" specific content (including, e.g., promoting the video of an artist who will be hosting a concert on TikTok Live) in line with company content policies to support the inclusion of diverse and high-quality content on the platform. A content operations team will review heating requests submitted by a limited number of cross-functional partners with access to the heating request, and the Content Operations team will either approve or reject the request based on their assessment of whether it follows the platform's best…
Please people stop posting that "study" or at least read it before you take any conclusions from it. Good god it's terrible science.
Like even if it's not obvious to you how using Instagram as a "reference" for hashtags is not a good baseline it still doesn't mean anything in terms of how the content is spread because how are you going to detect algorithmic boosting and suppression by counting user generated content? A million posts with #cheesetastesbad could get less actual views than ten posts with #pro-cheese. And this is before accounting for vastly different tagging culture between social networks and different users entirely.
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/the-truth-about-tiktok-hashtags-and-content-during-the-israel-hamas-war
> Blunt comparisons of hashtags is severely flawed and misrepresentative of the activity on TikTok.
> It’s critical to understand that hashtags on the platform are created and added to videos by content creators, not TikTok. Millions of people in regions such as the Middle East and South East Asia account for a significant proportion of views on hashtags. Therefore, there’s more content with #freepalestine and #standwithpalestine and more overall views. It is easy to cherry pick hashtags to support a false narrative about the platform.
TikTok could be completely totally bold-faced evil and this study still wouldn't be good evidence of it.
Quite a few ways, whether through device/session fingerprinting [1], in-app browser keystroke tracking [2], frequent third-party post requests [3], individiual app usage patterns [4], geo-tracking [5], dark-patterned user onboarding [6] and continual facial recognition [7].
A canary blog series kicked off by the company itself is worth keeping an eye on to see the 'myths' they want to debunk most scrupously (such as keytracking)[8].
[1]: https://www.nullpt.rs/reverse-engineering-tiktok-vm-1
[2]: https://krausefx.com/blog/announcing-inappbrowsercom-see-what-javascript-commands-get-executed-in-an-in-app-browser
[3]: https://app.urlgeni.us/blog/new-research-across-200-ios-apps-hints-surveillance-marketing-may-still-be-going-strong
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html
[5]: https://www.afr.com/technology/tiktok-admits-collecting-location-data-20230309-p5cqo8
[6]: https://au.reset.tech/uploads/resettechaustralia_policymemo_tiktok_final_online.pdf
[7]: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/25/971460327/tiktok-to-pay-92-million-to-settle-class-action-suit-over-theft-of-personal-data
[8]: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/tiktok-truths-a-new-series-on-our-privacy-and-data-security-practices
There are plenty of parallels with what happened with Snapchat Stories, but I do wonder if it's the "same thing".
Stories are best when created by people you know, and they're easy to create too. They're the type of content that would build off of Instagram's social strengths.
The type of content people consume on TikTok, as far as I understand, is largely made by creators though. This is similar to YouTube; they now even get financial compensation directly for it too [1] (although apparently this compensation is not as good as YouTube's).
This could be a Snapchat vs Instagram Stories situation, or it could be a YouTube vs Facebook Watch / IGTV situation. Facebook has historically been notoriously bad at creating a high-quality video platform, so if that's what it takes to beat TikTok I honestly wouldn't expect Instagram Reels to overtake TikTok anytime soon, especially considering a lot of what I've seen there are random accounts reposting TikTok content (which feels a bit like the type of content Watch became infamous for).
[1]: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/tiktok-creator-fund-your-questions-answered