TikTok

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

How to

How to use

• https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-tik-tok/

How to export

(stub — this needs help being filled in!)

How to delete content

(stub — this needs help being filled in!)

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

None yet...?

Tools

• tiktok-mf2.tanna.dev (announcement):   Jamie Tanna's service that scrapes video posts and converts them to microformats2. Source.

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)

• 2019-12-04 Matthias Eberl: Twitter thread: “I did a detailed privacy check of the TikTok app and website.” (archived) (archive is of Thread Reader App to get cleanest HTML)

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

• 2020-04-08 @bangorlol: "TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it." (archived)

See Also

• video
• silo
• Vine
• 2019/Berlin2/nextgen
• 2019/Berlin2/tiktok
• Privacy Analysis of Tiktok’s App and Website
• Criticism: amplifies physiognomic bubbles: https://twitter.com/MarcFaddoul/status/1232014908536938498
  • "A TikTok novelty: FACE-BASED FITLER BUBBLES
    The AI-bias techlash seems to have had no impact on newer platforms.
    Follow a random profile, and TikTok will only recommend people who look almost the same.
    Let’s do the experiment from a fresh account:
    1/6" @MarcFaddoul February 24, 2020
• https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/
• Downloader tool for one's TikTok profile https://www.fyp.rip/
• Possible refutation of some criticisms: (thread) https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1509151904638517253
  • "SCOOP: Meta is paying Targeted Victory, one of the biggest Republican consulting firms, to quietly orchestrate a nationwide campaign to turn the public against TikTok.
    
    We got a hold of documents outlining their plan. Read my and @drewharwell story
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/" @TaylorLorenz March 30, 2022
• pipes
• https://tiktok-mf2.tanna.dev
• https://git.jlel.se/jlelse/TikTokJsonFeed
• Feature: has a form of blocking others from quoting of your posts: https://wandering.shop/@annaleen/109570143984738551
  • "TikTok already allows users to prevent others from turning their posts into a duet, which is roughly the same thing. If TikTok can do it, surely Mastodon can." @annaleen December 24, 2022
• Permalink embed hack: change "tiktok." in the URL to "vxtiktok." before embedding / sharing and it will embed a much friendlier (no cookies) version that will play videos inline without having to load/login to TikTok.
• Criticism of owner ByteDance, abusive crawling practices: https://mastodon.schub.social/@denschub/112154270295804094
  • "I love checking my webserver logs to investigate a huge traffic spike on an asset proxy service I run - just to discover that the User-Agent is "Bytespider", a crawling bot operated by ByteDance, allegedly used to train their "AI"s.Gosh I hate "AI" companies. Fuck off." @denschub March 25, 2024