TikTok

From IndieWeb


TikTok is a video sharing app where users create and share short videos, often set to music.

How to

How to use

How to export

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How to delete content

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How to delete account

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Use their API

TikTok's only open API developer products are limited: SSO (ie "log in with TikTok"), web embedding, share buttons for web and mobile, and webhooks for a few event types, notably video uploads.

There's also a Business API (docs), which is much more full featured, but seems to require a business/ads account. That looks free and self serve, but they also have an API approval process, which looks like it includes human moderation.

There's a robust scraping community, and even at least one mature-looking company with a commercial service, TikAPI.

IndieWeb Examples

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Tools


Criticism

Unequal & exploitative revenue share

TikTok uses a region-locked "creator fund", a set pool of money that is distributed amongst popular accounts and viral videos. This creates a system where creators end up being paid less individually the more people use (and succeed) on the platform, and massively reduces the share of revenue reaching creators compared to other platforms, like Youtube.

2022-01-20 Hank Green: So... TikTok Sucks (archived)

Copies clipboard contents from other apps

2020-06-26 Zak Doffman: Warning—Apple Suddenly Catches TikTok Secretly Spying On Millions Of iPhone Users (archived)

Banned Black Users using BlackLivesMatter and #ImBlackMovement hashtags

2020-05-019 Alaa Elassar: TikTokers stand in solidarity with black creators to protest censorship (archived)

Fear of Chinese intelligence in US hardware

2019-10-24 US Senator Schumer: Avoid visiting, installing, using, and delete all content & apps if you already did unless you want to possibly/likely have Chinese State Intelligence tracking your device & activities (archived)

Prevented marginalized users from showing up in feeds

2019-12-02 Adi Robertson: TikTok prevented disabled users’ videos from showing up in feeds (archived)

2019-12-04 Elena Botella: TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators (archived)

Locked out of account for political message

2019-11-26 Drew Harwell: A 17-year-old posted to TikTok about China’s detention camps. She was locked out of her account (archived)

Handles personal data non-transparently (and possibly illegally)

A Reddit user reverse engineered the app and described the information it collects:

See Also