That’s the question posed by a new report from Forbes, which says that an internal security team at ByteDance — TikTok’s Beijing-based parent — ran investigations into a US-based security leader that may have contributed to his departure last month. This is the same team that Forbes reported on last week, saying they planned to monitor the location of specific American citizens.
Say you’d like to promote your brilliant tweet or painstakingly crafted Facebook meme, and you want to do it right from the main iPhone app. In the past, companies like Facebook have argued that Apple shouldn’t get a cut of these paid “boosts” on posts, since they’re a form of advertising. But today, Apple said “Nah, just give us 30 percent, it’s in our rules now.”
This all follows Apple’s app-tracking transparency changes doing a number on social media ad businesses. Apple did carve out a caveat, though: sole-purpose apps for ad buying don’t need to give Apple a cut.
On Thursday night, TikTok tweeted a thread pushing back on Forbes’ report that it planned to track specific US citizens using the app. This morning, article author Emily Baker-White tweeted a thread of her own responding to the response, pointing out that “neither TikTok nor ByteDance denied anything we reported.”
When she released “Folklore,” “traffic swelled by ‘roughly a half million page views,’” one of Metacritic’s founders told The New York Times. Swift’s newest album, “Midnights,” launches tomorrow, and I have to imagine it will mean another big day for Metacritic.
[The New York Times]
When you block someone, you can now block all accounts they currently have (or may make in the future). Meta says this should lead to just a bit less manual blocking... like, say, 4 million fewer manual blocks per week.
Instagram’s word blocking feature is also getting updated to catch more intentional m1ssp3llings of words meant to avoid filtering. Plus, they’ll catch story replies now, too.
