TikTok

Casey Newton shines a light on the increasingly common social media scam that primarily targets teen boys in his most recent Platformer newsletter:

But when a terrifying scam comes along that has led to at least 20 confirmed deaths in the past two years, a whole stack of investigations can’t seem to get a conversation going. [...] Perhaps the surgeon general, instead of his new ham-fisted campaign against every risk that social media presents, could warn parents about this one.

TikTok, like other social platforms, has become part of the political fabric: politicians campaign on TikTok and groups attempt to spread propaganda via influence campaigns.

In the lead up to the UK general election, TikTok is surfacing videos from journalists and fact checkers. It’s also sharing tips for spotting fake news and definitions for things like disinformation.

This time from the Department of Justice, after the Federal Trade Commission said it was referring a complaint to the agency based on an investigation involving a children’s privacy law. The FTC said it doesn’t usually make this kind of referral public, but believed it in the public interest. TikTok said it “strongly disagree[s]” with the allegations and said many of them are outdated.

According to Forbes, TikTok accounts for Paris Hilton and CNN have been hijacked recently by a “zero-day” attack in the app’s DMs that could be activated simply by opening the message.

TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek sent us this statement:

Our security team is aware of a potential exploit targeting a number of brand and celebrity accounts. We have taken measures to stop this attack and prevent it from happening in the future. We’re working directly with affected account owners to restore access, if needed.

The former President, who once attempted to ban the platform, posted his first video to it yesterday under his usual handle of @realdonaldtrump.

As Politico notes, Trump reversed his stance earlier this year after momentum behind the ban abruptly rekindled and President Biden signed it into law.

Oral arguments in its case against the federal divest-or-ban bill will be scheduled for this September, according to an order from the DC Circuit Court. That’s just months before the initial January 19th deadline its Chinese owner ByteDance has to sell the app or face a ban. The clock keeps running unless the court says otherwise.

Creators can edit and manage content, access post analytics, and view their monetization in the TikTok Studio app, the company announced today. A web version of the platform is already live.

According to current employees who spoke to The Information after being told of the cuts: 

“The layoff will affect a large percentage of the roughly 1,000 people working in TikTok’s global user operations, content and marketing.”

TikTok cut about 60 workers from its sales and advertising teams back in January.

On today’s episode of Decoder, Verge editors Alex Heath and Sarah Jeong join me to discuss the lawsuit TikTok filed last week against the US government in response to the divest-or-ban bill.

One reason I wanted to have both Alex and Sarah on here is that there’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law; some of TikTok’s arguments are contradicted by the simple facts of what the company has already promised to do around the world, and some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of attempts to regulate speech and the internet.

TikTok averted a ban once before under the Trump administration. But this time around, the bill is on far more solid footing, and TikTok is arguing that divesting its US business is not possible “commercially, technologically, or legally.” So we walked through each of those arguments one by one.

The creator subscription platform markets itself as basically the opposite of the algorithm-driven TikTok — but that doesn’t mean Patreon is celebrating the forced divestment from ByteDance.

Banning TikTok just serves to further entrench YouTube and Instagram as the dominant platforms in this industry. But more competition is good for creators–it gives them more leverage and ultimately more control over their businesses.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with China’s Xi Jinping today to discuss everything from AI to the war in Ukraine. But “TikTok did not come up,” Blinken told reporters at a short press conference following his meetings today. Seriously, that’s all he said. Maybe next time.

Meanwhile, sources tell The Information that ByteDance is “internally exploring scenarios for selling.” It’s been literally one day since the divest-or-ban ultimatum became law, so I hope you’re ready for another nine to twelve months of spin.

Our latest episode of Decoder is about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.

This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next.