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.
Twitch launched the ability to edit vertical clips in its clips editor in May, and starting this week, you’ll be able to publish those clips directly to TikTok from the editor. Seems like a handy way to save a few steps.
Perhaps you’ve seen them: two girls, one wordlessly mixing a drink while the other one snacks. Why don’t they talk?
Honestly, the internet is too loud. The feed is too loud. TikTok is too loud. I’m scrolling and I just want everyone to shut the fuck up.
Turns out it’s still possible to have mystique on social media.
[The Face]
Craig Fay’s TikTok about Die Hard is a good two-minute watch if you want to one-up someone the next time they want to drop the Die Hard Christmas trivia on you.
It’s more nuanced than Fay presents, so here’s some supplemental reading from Den of Geek with more detail about Die Hard’s sequel history.
The Wall Street Journal writes about the ubiquity of those unauthorized, user-uploaded movie clips on TikTok that may sometimes show up in your recommendations on the service.
WSJ reports that uploaders “appear to” game the algorithm with bot followers that boost a video’s popularity to get it into users’ FYP. Then, once users linger on a few, the algorithm surfaces more.
[The Wall Street Journal]
I’ve been playing F-Zero 99 every chance I get since Nintendo released it this week. It took 43 races, but I got first place... by the skin of my teeth.
It stung a little when Thursday’s Nintendo Direct showed the opening of a race from the SNES F-Zero and it wasn’t a surprise F-Zero GX sequel announcement, but to its credit, F-Zero 99 is a blast.
A recent study by ArXiv has found that ads for AI-supported essay-writing services claiming they can fool anti-cheating software are thriving on TikTok and Meta platforms.
TikTok said in a statement to Fast Company that it has since removed the ads highlighted in the study, adding that while some AI ads are permitted, it doesn’t “allow ads that are misleading or dishonest.”
Chris Rock and Diplo may have made it out, but judging from a TikTok of somebody trying to get their SUV going, that was no small feat.
It’s even more apparent how rough things are when you see a bunch of RVs taking a crack at it.
Variety spoke to Harmony Korine, who’s about to debut a new movie shot on thermal cameras.
“Watching a lot of this shit, you really feel the algorithms,” he says the day before receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Whereas, “I’ll see a clip on TikTok that is so inexplicable, so outside the realm of what I even imagine someone creating. Like, I can have an experience with a 30-second clip that goes so far beyond” what movies do for him.
He’s also obsessed with a TikTok radio station right now. “It’s the greatest radio station I’ve ever heard,” he told Variety.
For example: Lynels are challenging beasts that take practiced timing, powerful weapons, and patience to beat.
...or you could just slap them with a ring of cooking pots on a spinning wheel. Whatever works for you.
Chicago joins Cleveland, Milwaukee, New York City, and Columbus on the list of city governments suing Kia and Hyundai over cars that can be stolen in seconds by teenagers armed with nothing more than a USB cable and the knowledge gleaned from a TikTok video, as we wrote about the Kia Boys thieves in June.
The failure of Kia and Hyundai to install basic auto-theft prevention technology in these models is sheer negligence, and as a result, a citywide and nationwide crime spree around automobile theft has been unfolding right before our eyes.
Since videos posted on social media exposed this defect, thefts of Kia and Hyundai vehicles in Chicago surged from about 500 in the first half of 2022 to more than 8,350 during the second half of the year. Thefts of Kia and Hyundai vehicles continue to comprise more than half of all vehicles stolen in Chicago in 2023.
According to a big report about TikTok Shop in The Information, TikTok is considering the big move to better bolster its shopping efforts.
This year, the shopping service is set to lose more than $500 million in the US, The Information says.
What’s the good of being named Wesley if I don’t have a Star Trek: The Next Generation-era console to fiddle with? The Trek-themed launcher in this TikTok from thetechpreacher might be just the thing... if I had a Pixel Fold.
Yes, these launchers have been around forever, but look, I forgot about them, and this video awakened something in me.
I wish he said where it’s from. I think it’s this one?
In a draft agreement obtained by Forbes, TikTok reportedly offered the government a number of concessions to avoid a ban in the US.
That included the ability for the DOJ and DOD to examine TikTok’s US servers, prevent changes to its privacy policies, and even “veto the hiring” of anyone on its data security team. It’s not clear if any of these purported agreements are still on the table, however, as Forbes says the document was drafted in the summer of 2022.
Setting aside the idea that a motorized standing desk that lets you sit and stand throughout your day might actually help with back pain, this song by Tom McGovern sums up why I’ve never tried a standing desk.
That and, candidly, I really don’t have the emotional energy to undo my displays’ wall mounts and patch all the holes.
The company’s music head, Ole Obermann, talked to Semafor about how that’ll work:
“The music that gets served up to you in terms of recommendations in TikTok Music will be heavily influenced by what we already know about your musical tastes through TikTok ... you could also be in TikTok Music with a playlist of your favorite songs, and then, say, go make a video using a particular song as the soundtrack.”
The service has already debuted in Indonesia and Brazil and is going to expand “eventually.”
Younger generations expect news to come straight from creators. But when creators are wrong, the news ecosystem quickly breaks down.
Women have a lot of things to do these days — we go on hot girl walks in our tomato girl dresses; prepare our girl dinners in our clean girl apartments. And of course, be a vessel for mass marketing campaigns.
As Vox’s Rebecca Jennings points out, these “trends” are just repackaged normal things we do (walk, eat, tidy our homes). But tack “girl” on to something and it creates the potential for virality and money — a new generation of girlbossing.
“MovieTok” TikTok creators are in The New York Times letting everyone know they are not critics — as if that wasn’t already very clear.
Unsurprisingly, the line between a promotional post and an honest review is nearly nonexistent. Some make sponcon for studios or accept gifts; others avoid saying anything too mean:
Cruz, 34, echoed other MovieTok reviewers who said they dislike doing sharply negative posts and would be unlikely to slam a movie whether they were in business with the studio or not. She said she generally prefers to deliver negative opinions in the form of a “compliment sandwich,” preceded and followed by more positive remarks.
Perhaps this is why studios are hitting up influencers during the Hollywood strikes?
[The New York Times]
Bill Hammack, AKA The Engineer Guy, explains why he calls this Nerf three-dart blaster’s cascading air mechanism “the epitome of good engineering” in this video on TikTok and YouTube.
It’s an old video, but watching his explanation of how the blaster’s series of valves trigger just one barrel at a time — and how to defeat its design to fire more than one dart — is immensely satisfying.
Self-proclaimed meme artist Sunday Nobody went to incredible lengths to create his hot dog sculptures, fabricating a custom mold to melt down blocks of ice from leftover water from cooking 394 hot dogs.
He then mailed them in unrefrigerated containers so that when they arrived, they would just be... jars of hot dog water. Don’t worry, people knew what they were buying:
Unrefrigerated hot dog shaped ice sculpture made from frozen hot dog water. When it arrives the ice sculpture will just be a puddle of melted hot dog water in a sealed container. Glass container is hermetically sealed with waterproof and smell proof silicon sealant. Comes with a numbered polaroid picture documenting the ice sculpture before its death by melting.
A new feature lets users import full shows via their RSS feed and link them to shorter clips — potentially a big new way to boost discovery.
TikTok’s global product communications manager Zachary Kizer confirmed that the company is testing the podcast feature with some US users, but declined to share further details.
TikTok creator Nahre Sol put up a couple of masterful, quick breakdowns of the songs that play when you ride a horse, in both The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and its prequel, Breath of the Wild.
The songs are slightly different whether you’re riding during the day or at night, and both look... challenging.
