A small group of social network employees has the possibility of promoting content chosen according to fairly vague rules, according to a survey by the magazine “Forbes”.
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The content displayed in the wire of Tiktok users are not always chosen by a cold and mathematical algorithm: they can occasionally be promoted by very human people, reveals a Survey published Friday January 20 in the American magazine Forbes. Social network personnel can indeed promote the dissemination of content, a practice named Heating internally and kept secret by Tiktok. According to an internal document, which Forbes was able to consult, these videos propelled voluntarily in the “wire” for you “of social network users represent every day approximately 1 % to 2 % of the total volume of the sequences consulted.
According to anonymous testimonies collected by the magazine, Tiktok would not always use this weapon to promote videos that can appeal to its users or to increase the variety of content. It would also be used to court influencers and brands in order to make them sign partnerships. According to three anonymized testimonies, Employees of the Chinese company have even used it to promote their own publications or those of their relatives, in violation of the company’s regulations.
In a response to Forbes, Tiktok admitted promoting certain videos “to help diversify the content and present to our community certain emerging creators and other celebrities”. The company ensures, however, that “this content represents approximately 0.002 % of the videos that appear in the” “for you”, specifying that “for content published in the United States, only a few people based in the United States have the possibility of Use this tool “.
of previous scandals
These revelations arise as the platform recently sought to show its desire for transparency on the functioning of its algorithm, regularly implicated for its opacity and its potential harmful effects. In A blog post published at the end of December , the company announced the launch of a new feature allowing users to learn more about the reasons why content was offered to them in their thread. Among the potential factors were listed the history of the user or the popularity of certain content in a given geographical area.
As Forbes, Tiktok also recognized, also recognized in December that some of his employees had spied on American journalists, including the author of the investigation, in order to try to find the sources originally information leaks to the media. And, according to the American magazine, the spy team – since licensees – was led by an employee based in China. Tiktok is, in fact, controlled by Bytedance, a Chinese company.
animated by the fear of a potential use of the application by China for interference purposes, the American political class agrees around a boycott of Tiktok. In December, the Senate voted unanimously a bill prohibiting its use on the devices owned by the federal state, while a other bill , tabled December 13 By elected officials from both sides, intends to prohibit Tiktok in the country.