Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What you didn’t know about TikTok. 🤫”.
Did you know that Tick Tock has just passed 3.5 billion downloads, almost half as many people as there are on this planet, that Tick Tock users use the app for a startling average of one hour 35 minutes every single day or that in 2021 the company quietly Changed their terms and conditions to allow them to collect your biometric data using your camera and your microphone to learn how you react to certain content through your expressions and vocal responses like laughing, but we are just getting started. So here are 37 more things that you didn’t know about this app getting more and more bizarre as we go. If you ever wondered why the tiktok logo looks like this. It’S two things: it’s a musical note, because music is a key part of tick, tock content and it’s also the letter d and that’s because Tick Tock was not built from scratch. It was actually cloned from an existing Chinese.
App called doyin doyam was launched in 2016 by the company bite dance, and it became very clear that this whole concept of short form vertical videos was a gold mine, but there was one problem: the strict way that China senses content and control holes. What can and can’t be shown wouldn’t have allowed the app to flourish internationally and likewise, a lot of the more controversial International content would most likely get the app banned in China. So they split the app into two and created Tick Tock, which works in the exact same way. But you just can’t see any of the content from doyin on it, and then the master stroke was that instead of starting Tick, Tock off from scratch and just hoping it became a hit abroad, bike does decided to acquire a similar app at the time called musically.
That was popular in the United States and then just swap their app for tick tock. So the 80 million accounts that people already had on musically the next time they opened the app they just became Tick Tock users, whether they liked it or not. While there’s no denying the intelligence of the people who made Tick-Tock do have some doubts about some of the users here are the five dumbest most dangerous challenges that have spread on the platform. Oh and please don’t try any of these at home anywhere. Really. First up is the penny challenge where kids on Tick Tock were plugging adapters halfway into wall socket, so that the electrical pins were exposed and then pressing a penny against them at best. This is a huge fire hazard. At worst, you could be killed by electrocution the sole challenge isn’t any better, which involves pouring salt into your mouth for several seconds and trying to swallow it all without coughing.
It everywhere, which sure I mean it, looks kind of funny, but your body can only handle so much sodium at any one time and the sudden Spike from doing this can cause dehydration, confusion, nausea and even a stroke for those with even less of a regard for Their personal safety, we have the fire challenge where you draw shapes on a mirror with fire accelerants like rubbing alcohol or hairspray, and then you set it on fire which resulted in countless teens being hospitalized, including one 13 year old. He was left with burns on over 35 percent of his body. The back cracking challenge involves locking arms with someone else back to back and then once they start, leaning forward your back will stretch and make cracking sounds. It was designed to be some sort of therapeutic experiment – I guess but random teens on Tick.
Tock aren’t chiropractors as much as they seem to want to be and messing with your spine in a non-controlled way can very easily lead to permanent damage. But then, every now and again, a challenge does exactly what it says on the tin like the skull breaker challenge, the idea is that three people stand in a line and the person in the middle jumps while they’re in the air. The other two will then kick their feet, sending them crashing to the ground head first, with no way to catch themselves. This can easily end your life and many many teenagers were hospitalized after participating when it was trending in 2020..
Now I hear what you’re thinking right now, if they’re, obviously so, dumb and dangerous. Why do challenges like this spread on Tick, Tock? Well, the algorithm of all social media platforms. Not one of them has an algorithm that is a as intelligent as tick tocks and B. As mercilessly optimized for engagement, even potentially at the cost of its use as well-being, it figured out how much viewers enjoyed watching these challenges it kept serving them to more further encouraging the creators to undertake them as to how that algorithm actually works, though, when any video Is posted on Tick Tock? The app takes note of everything about that video reads: the captions written by the Creator. It is the types of sounds that are being made in the content. It uses natural language processing to create a transcript of exactly what is being said and then, when it pairs this level of understanding about what a piece of content is with how long each individual user spends on that video.
It starts to understand what makes every single person tick talk, but to a shockingly detailed extent, there was an incredible investigation by The Wall Street Journal into this. They created a bunch of bots with various different personalities and interests and let them loose on Tick, Tock and no joke within just 36 minutes of monitoring their behavior. The app had actually figured out exactly what they were programmed to be interested in, even though it was never actually officially entered anywhere, and the danger is that, because the algorithm’s design is so laser focused on just retention. If someone who’s, let’s say depressed, starts a profile on the app it won’t take long before, that person is being shown cynical, depressing content that may well make their situation worse.
One of the other key things that plays The Tick tock’s Advantage is this reputation they’ve created that this is the platform that anyone can become famous on, and that is also thanks to this algorithm Tech. Talk knows that they don’t need to incentivize already big creators, and so even more so than any other platform. Tiktok does not care about your follow. Accounts.
You’Ll literally have people with 10 million followers who regularly get 50 000 views or less, and it also really doesn’t care about your previous knowledge of tags or keywords to keep it accessible for everyone. Instead, Tick Tock focuses on the watch time of an individual piece of content that you’ve posted it’ll start by serving your video to a few people. Who’Ve shown that they are interested in similar keywords that are either written in the caption or just said in the video. But then to actually see if it’s worthy of the big views it’ll also show that video to a test audience outside of that main interest group. If a video performs well with this test audience, it gets promoted to the next tier, where a wider audience will see it. There are four tiers in total and if a video reaches tier 4, it could potentially be shown to Millions.
It creates this. This unpredictability. That means that any person, whether they’ve, got five followers or 500 000 followers feels like they can, with their next article, become the next big sensation. So this is why people are spending vast amounts of time on tiktok, but how are they spending the majority of that time, apart from watching life hacks that don’t work that just sparked okay, so the most followed user right now is a guy, with over 153 million Followers on one channel – that’s even more than Mr Beast he’s a Creator on YouTube.
The most viewed video is a floating illusion, called Magic Ride by Zach King with an insane 2.2 billion. It’S well deserved. It’S shocking it’s Snappy and the fact that there’s no talking means that it ascends all language barriers, but the most popular video based on how viewers felt about it seems to be this one by Bella porch, which I have to say.
I don’t understand as much just for some perspective despacito the single most liked video on the entire YouTube, has 50 million likes this thing. I don’t even know how to describe it, has over 60 million, and that’s really thanks to the insane engagement rates on the platform. While YouTube has an average engagement rate of 1.63, meaning that for any video, only 1.63 of people will like or comment tick. Tocks is 18, which I would guess is largely due to the fact that they’ve placed all the buttons for interaction right under where your thumb would naturally rest while scrolling.
Let’S see if we can beat that reputation, though I’m going to let you know in the comments down below what the engagement rate on this video is. This is kind of crazy, but let us actually see if we can beat tick. Tock’S 18 there’s absolutely tons of cool, clever stuff that Tick Tock does so just before we delve into the dark underbelly of the platform. Let’S talk about the fun bits like, for instance, you know that generic robotic Tick-Tock Voice top 5 worst YouTube channels, number five, Mister who’s. I know that it sounds completely computer generated, but this is actually voice recorded from a real woman.
An American radio DJ named Kat Galligan. It is me or like tick, tock’s secret emojis, that you can’t access through your phone’s keyboards. There are 46 in total and to use them. You actually have to copy and paste specific shortcut codes in square brackets like smile or shout gosh, that’s terrifying, or that you can get access to new filters effects and other features by joining The Tick Tock testers program in the me tab and the app kind of Rewards your loyalty, because testers can actually even make suggestions on changes to the app if they’ve had an account for long another feature, that’s well actually useful.
Assuming that the algorithm somehow hasn’t already learned everything about you is the hidden way to dislike videos, there’s no actual dislike button. But if you want to see less of something you can actually just tap and hold on a video and press not interested, but this is probably my favorite trick. You can literally use a tick tock as your iPhone lock screen by just going to the share, icon and selecting live, photo it’ll save to your photos in a format that can move on your lock screen. You can do this on Android too.
You just need the specific tiktok wallpaper app, so there’s no doubt about it. Tiktok has plenty of Merit, but now we’re in the top 10. time to talk about the dark side, completely separate to its scarily, powerful algorithm, its lack of moderation and its current state. Of being investigated by the US government for being the perfect place for child Predators, people all over the world are trying to ban Tick Tock right now.
Over security concerns like, for instance, Donald Trump attempted to pass an executive order Banning the app in the United States. In 2020., over fears that by dance might actually be secretly feeding American citizens data to the Chinese government. It failed, but there are 19 U.S states right now that have banned the app from government devices because they just don’t trust it, and it’s not just the United States.
Tick Tock is right now banned in India for similar National Security concerns Afghanistan, where the Taliban band of the app to avoid Western influence over its people and Russia, where the app has been restricted to only showing existing Russian content by tiktok themselves. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s kind of impossible to see for sure whether or not Tick Tock is actually involved in any kind of Espionage for the Chinese government. The only thing that we do know is that they do have a history free of pro-china censorship like in 2019, tick, tock’s, original moderation, guidelines, they got leaked and it was explicitly written there that they were to ban content mentioning issues such as the Tiananmen Square massacre. In which the Chinese government gunned down protesters who they disagreed with higher-ups at tiktok have even recently claimed that they were actually asked by the Chinese government to create a disguised stealth account for the purpose of spreading propaganda in the west. But then they did follow that up by saying that they said no to them regardless.
You can see why this potential link that they have is worrying to some. It’S actually given that researchers at the University of Vermont found that in early 2022, Tick Tock shares more of its users, personal data than any other social media app alongside YouTube, except that, whereas YouTube almost exclusively shares its data. Just with Google largely an explicitly to improve their own Services, Tech talk shares with mostly third-party trackers and don’t know who they are. They also actually got in quite a lot of trouble when iOS 14 added a new transfer currency feature that revealed the app was accessing data from your clipboard, without even asking you that’s, basically anything that you’ve clicked copy on beforehand. There is no reason at all that Tick. Tock should need access to that. Okay, now we’re down to the top three the three times that Tick Tock has landed themselves in the most hot water, starting with a time where researchers concluded that Tick Tock caused teenagers to develop something called Tick-Tock ticks during the first covered, lockdowns teenagers all over the World started displaying sudden and often severe physical texts which lead to Serious disability in some cases when they looked into it, doctors found one strange similarity between these teenagers that almost all of them had been watching content about Tourette Syndrome on Tick Tock.
The doctors theorized that the content they’ve been watching during this extremely stressful period of the early covid-19 pandemic had influenced the symptoms of their stress responses, leading to these ticks only developing in those teens, and while that incident wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Rather, it’s more of mysterious medical phenomena on Tech. Talk is directly involved in some extremely Shady business like when, in 2019, a 19 year old user took his own life on a live stream.
Instead of immediately calling the police as soon as they found out like anyone should do Tick, Tock decided to wait three hours to get their PR story straight before informing the authorities, which says a lot about where their priorities seemed to lie, but possibly the shadiest most Horrifying secrets about Tick Tock is that this company have literally instructed their moderators in the past to suppress videos featuring people who are too, and I quote, ugly, poor or disabled. To give its viral content and an aspirational quality. There was a tick tocker who just got banned a few weeks ago, because her acne was too much. She was being flagged as gruesome content.
It’S it’s kind of scary to think that it’s not just a quirk of the algorithm that this is explicitly what Tick Tock wanted to keep away from you. You know what’s even scarier, though getting hacked I got hacked a few years ago on Christmas Day and fighting back against these hackers to regain control of my accounts was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life, and it happened because the account details of one Of the accounts I logged into got leaked and being young and dumb. I also set the same account details as my login for YouTube, but I could have very easily prevented all of that just by using surfshark alert. It’S like your own personal online radar that, as soon as your email address, appears in any breached online database, we’ll detect it and let you know because chances are if your email gets leaked, your password probably isn’t far off either, and this is a fun bit.
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