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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

 Tagged with tiktok


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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19 October 2022

TikTok is raising its minimum age for livestreaming from 16 to 18 from next month.

A BBC News investigation found hundreds of accounts going live from Syrian refugee camps, with children begging for donations.

Some were receiving up to $1,000 (£900) an hour - but when they withdrew the cash, TikTok had taken up to 70%.

In future, only adults would be able to "send virtual gifts or access monetisation features", TikTok said.

 

It is unclear how TikTok will enforce these age restrictions, however.

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15 September 2022

The NewsGuard investigation found that for a sampling of searches on prominent news topics, almost 20 percent of the videos presented as search results contained misinformation. This means that for searches on topics ranging from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to school shootings and COVID vaccines, TikTok’s users are consistently fed false and misleading claims.

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21 July 2022

More teenagers are turning away from traditional media outlets and getting their news from social media, new research from Ofcom has shown.

The number of people consuming news content on TikTok has increased from 800,000 in 2020 to 3.9 million in 2022.

For the first time, Instagram is the most popular news source among younger people - used by 29% of teens in 2022 - with TikTok and YouTube close behind.

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