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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

 Tagged with tiktok


14 March 2023

'Toward the end of 2022, 8.8 million people watched a TikTok in which a young woman warned viewers: “Stop sleeping on your stomach/side or your face will droop.” One tweeted response to the video later earned more than 6,000 likes. It reads: “[It’s] terrifying that the anti-aging industry has wormed its way into younger and younger audiences. Teenage girls shouldn’t have to feel constantly terrified that everything they do is causing their face to look older.”'

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06 February 2023

Dakota Fink didn’t mean to spread a lie. Honestly, she didn’t.

It was May 2021 and the 23-year-old LA-based model was wearing a face mask. “I was thinking I needed to be more involved with TikTok,” she says. So she decided to record a video as a joke: She’d pull off the flesh-coloured face mask on camera, and subtitle it with a claim that women had to peel layers of their skin off after their period.

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16 January 2023

But assertions that Tate’s rise is a product of today’s young men and their views are wrong. In fact, Tate repeatedly failed to build a personal brand until TikTok gave him the means to saturate news feeds.

Archives of his website show that his business and his pitch to young men was the same four years ago as it is today. As far back as 2019, his website promised courses that would “have your girlfriend obey every command”.

So if Tate’s ambitions and pitch to young men have stayed the same, what changed? The answer lies in how Tate learned to game TikTok’s algorithm, allowing his content to flood millions of news feeds.

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04 November 2022

..Because her videos weren’t getting many views, she felt it “wasn’t a big deal” to have a public account to showcase her family’s life during lockdown, with many of the videos featuring her and her daughters dancing around the house.

The comments she got on the video, many of which revolved around her daughter’s appearance, “horrified” her.

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