TikTok is the social media sensation that all of Silicon Valley — and a lot of Washington, DC — has their eyes on. The app, created by ByteDance, became famous for rocketing musicians and dancers to stardom. But as its popularity and influence have grown, so has scrutiny of its privacy policies, security, and influence, with legislators voicing concern about its ownership by a Chinese firm. Meanwhile, social media competitors are doing everything they can to knock off TikTok’s features and usurp its short-form video dominance.
How one cover of one mostly unknown song became the soundtrack of terrifying vertical videos.
Netflix: probably a winner in 2024. Disney Plus: rough times ahead. Peacock? Paramount Plus? Will they even exist in 12 months? Alex Cranz and I get to the bottom of this year’s streaming wars, and also maybe talk E Ink a little. But first: you know that creepy sound on TikTok videos about the North Sea? We have a story for you about that.
Chad the Bird, a comedy puppet, gives a surprisingly succinct high-level explanation for what happened when Willis Gibson, AKA Blue Scuti, became the first known person to crash Tetris.
This video is also... weirdly inspirational. For a slightly more technical and equally digestible explanation, check out YouTuber HydrantDude’s video.
I feel for Peppur Triplett, who told Business Insider she turned to the game as a COVID escape. She spent 10 years overall amassing her fortune and becoming the #11 player of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. And it shuts down in April.
The accessorizing fame game may not be my first choice, but I hate to see someone lose their favorite game. Free-to-play breaks everyone’s heart, eventually.
The fitness brand will show a mix of content in a new hub on the app, called #TikTokFitness Powered by Peloton, as the company shifts its focus to creating content instead of pricey workout equipment. In the hub, Peloton will show short-form classes, select live sessions, and collaborations between instructors and TikTok creators in an attempt to draw new users in.
Starting April 1st, TikTok will raise seller fees from two to six percent, reports The Information, before raising them to eight percent on many items on July 1st while still taking a lower cut of pricier products like electronics.
In some segments, TikTok’s new fees remain lower than Amazon’s, which are also dropping as both face competition from cheap outlets like Shein and Temu. The report also cites a source saying the TikTok Shop’s seller subsidies are being cut back after it lost about $500 million last year.
[The Information]
It’s a TV. It’s a roller coaster. It’s a 4D Disney World experience. It’s the Sphere, and it’s a lot more fun than my phone.
TikTok announced that the updated app will take better advantage of tablet and foldable screen real estate by pushing overlaid text to the side. The app also now works in portrait or landscape mode for devices where it didn’t previously, the company wrote.
Meanwhile, in the year 2023, Instagram on the iPad is just a crummy, blown-up iPhone app.
Green walks through the intricacies between TikTok, Reels, and Shorts — along with his earnings from each. The gist is Shorts > TikTok > Reels in terms of CPM, but watch the full clip for more context.
Creators are in a weird spot right now: TikTok wants videos longer than a minute, and Shorts only allows clips up to 60 seconds. And even when you’re making money, it’s hard to understand the exact breakdown.
He’s an elephant seal currently riling up a community in Tasmania. He is also all over TikTok. Obviously, I’m on the side of unruly elephant seals, whether in California or elsewhere. He’s perfect and I love him.
That’s according to the company’s quarterly report, published today. The 136 million figure is just under 1 percent of all videos published between July and September. Removals last quarter spiked — in the months preceding, TikTok removed around 106 million clips.
ByteDance reportedly scrapped it after sales of last year’s Pico 4 “fell far short of ByteDance’s expectations,” according to a report by The Information. The last headset still hasn’t launched in the US, as political heat has stayed on ByteDance and its other well-known project, TikTok.
However, the report also claims Pico engineers are working on a long-term “Swan” concept to develop a high-end headset inspired by Apple’s Vision Pro.
The ban was challenged by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in July, arguing that it’s “preventing or seriously impeding faculty” from undertaking research related to the app. College students and staff across the state have nevertheless found ways to sneak around the ban.
US District Judge Robert Pitman rejected the suit on Monday, calling the ban a “reasonable restriction” in light of Texas’ concerns about data privacy.
This happened last week, but I saw it today because of Techdirt’s great post about the dismissal. Indiana’s attorney general actually filed two lawsuits against TikTok in December 2022, but they were consolidated, the Associated Press reports.
US District Judge Donald W. Molloy issued a preliminary injunction (pdf) blocking the ban on Thursday, as reported by Reuters. The ban had been set to take effect on January 1st. TikTok sued Montana shortly after Governor Greg Gianforte signed SB 419 in May.
The money will go towards Project Clover, TikTok’s initiative to house European user data on local servers to address concerns from regulators.
TikTok’s data center in Ireland is already up and running, but it’s already working on another in Norway, where it expects data migration to begin in late 2024. Once complete, TikTok says its Norway facility will be the “largest data centre in Europe.”
This kind of video gets me in trouble at home because I will try to emulate it for fun. Just hours of recording noises and editing them, to the exclusion of all of the reasonable, responsible things I should do instead.
Anyway, here’s someone smacking, plucking, and scraping disparate household items to get the Netflix logo sound.
The Washington Post reports that the Senate Judiciary Committee dispatched subpoena-armed US Marshals to CEOs Linda Yaccarino of X (formerly Twitter) and Jason Citron of Discord for December 6th testimony about online child sexual exploitation. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was also subpoenaed but without the use of Marshals.
Lawmakers expect Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew to testify voluntarily as Congress continues to try to child-proof the internet with regulation.
[The Washington Post]
Sure, you can find out from the Nokia Wikipedia page that the famous ringtone comes from Spanish classical guitarist Francisco Tárrega’s 1902 composition “Gran Vais.” But this TikTok from Alexandra Whittingham was a much nicer way for me to learn that fact.
Software engineer Thomas Barlow has been making TikToks showing off a small musical quartet of step motors that he made possible with an Arduino, MIDI sequences, a little coding, and some other gear. He made a video showing how (and he published code and a tutorial on GitHub).
Anyway, who knew step motors are perfect for Radiohead?
The social media giant claims it’s not valuable enough, and is only being subjected to the strict obligations that come with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) gatekeeper designation because it’s being lumped together with Chinese parent ByteDance, which has many operations outside of Europe.
The deadline to appeal is today, November 16th, and so far Apple’s been very quiet. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have not challenged.
In 2020, the share of Americans age 18-29 who could say the same was just 9 percent, according to a new poll from Pew Research. Additionally, 43 percent of TikTok users report consuming news on the platform, up from 22 percent in 2020.
TikTok’s main feed now has an “add song” button that lets you save songs to your Spotify Liked Songs playlist. Spotify says both free and paid US and UK members will get it.
If you don’t see it yet, make sure to update both apps and set Spotify as as your default streaming service in the TikTok app (Settings > Music).
Update November 14th, 2023, 11:45AM ET: TechCrunch notes you can also pick Apple Music or Amazon Music.
“The government has decided to ban TikTok as it was necessary to regulate the use of the social media platform that was disrupting social harmony, goodwill and flow of indecent materials,” said Foreign Minister Narayan Prakash Saud at a cabinet meeting on Monday.
Nepal is the second country to go for a nation-wide ban of the popular social platform — India has also banned TikTok. Countries including the US, UK, and Canada have banned TikTok on government-issued devices.
Business Insider assigned two journalists the task of scrolling 500 TikTok videos each to tally up the number of ads they saw.
Both reported that around 30 percent of the content was sponsored. Insider notes that’s similar to broadcast TV’s roughly 28 percent.
TikTok’s been testing an ad-free tier for five bucks a month, so at least there’s that.
The race is on to find out: TechCrunch reports that TikTok is testing 15-minute video uploads, an increase of 5 minutes from the current max time. YouTube, meanwhile, is all in with Shorts as its answer to TikTok’s vertical, mobile-first format.
