Difference between revisions of "TikTok"

Revision as of 16:05, 27 March 2020

TikTok Logo

TikTok is a viral social networking and content creation app that’s been expanding in popularity since its creation. The apps original title was Musical.ly until the parent company of Musical.ly, Musical.ly inc., sold the rights of the app to a company called ByteDance in 2016. Upon ByteDances purchase, the app was then shifted into a platform for individual users to create and release short videos up to 60 seconds in length, allowing users to either share their content with the public, allowing anyone to see or keep the content private, only allowing specific users to see. It has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times and has 500 million active users per month^[1] with its most popular user having over 41.6 million followers. In addition to this, 69% of TikToks users span from ages 16 to 24 years old^[2]. The app has always targeted a younger audience in order to grow interest and achieve success. While the TikTok has gained a large amount of downloads over the past few years it is often criticized for breaching the privacy of its users. In addition to this, the app has notable ethical issues by executing/allowing cyberbullying in its community and allowing use of copyrighted material most specifically music, without proper licensing from their owners.

How it Started

Musical.ly Logo

Musical.ly

The origin of Tiktok dates back to 2014 with the creation of Musical.ly. Musical.ly was an app created by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang that allowed people to post short form music videos of themselves to share with an online community. To quote Biz Carson from his Business Insider "How a failed education startup turned into Musical.ly, the most popular app you've probably never heard of" in May 2016, "The team believes it's building the next social network to revolve around videos"^[3]. The app grew in notoriety, reaching 60 million active users. During this time, the app did not have a large international outreach and almost all users were from the United States. The lack of international outreach would later change after being bought out later that year.

Musical.ly to TikTok

In September 2016, Musical.ly was acquired by a company called ByteDance for over $1 billion. After acquiring musical.ly , ByteDance changed the name of the app to TikTok ^[4] and added more freedom in video creation as opposed to limiting their content to lip syncing videos. While the app is known as TikTok internationally, it goes by the name of Douyin in China, running off of separate servers due to China’s regulations ^[5].

ByteDance

ByteDance is a company based in Beijing, created by Zhang Yiming in 2012^[2]. One of its first apps, Toutiao, is among the most popular sites for people to retrieve the news in all of China. Chinese tech companies, such as ByteDance, benefit since they are able to spread their apps throughout China, but also have outreach that spreads across the world. This is in contrast to companies like Google that are banned from use in China. Moreover, being that all of ByteDance’s apps are free for use, the company receives almost all of its revenue from advertising. That being said, ByteDance’s goal for the creation of TikTok was to target a young audience due to the fact that young audiences have a higher capacity for long term use and often create the newest viral trends.

Growth and Success

In less than 4 years the app has obtained 1.5 billion downloads and has achieved an active monthly user base of 500 million. While the app is wide spread across the world with the exception of a few countries it has now started to catch the eye of the mainstream media. On March 10, 2020 one of the apps most famous users with 41.7 million followers, Charli D'Amelio made a live appearance on the hit late night show, "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon". The app has now received such a large amount of recognition that its users content is not only being shown on the app, but users are now gaining mass popularity to the point where they are being brought on television for interviews.

Features

Video Uploading

Users are able to either record and upload videos they took on the app or take videos they made from their own camera roll. Once the video is uploaded it is available to be viewed by the users followers if the account is private, or it can be viewed by anyone who uses the app if the account is public.

Following Page

The following page allows users to view videos posted by other users that they follow as they are released. Instead of having to look up each individual user for new posts all of them are filtered to one location.

For You Page

TikToks algorithm selects a feed of videos based off of what each user likes, watches, and shares. The page is never ending and leaves many users guessing what content they have to make in order to get on the "for you" page ^[6].

Examples of edits and filters that can be added to videos

Video editing

Users are able to edit their videos in many different ways including

• Shading
• Lengthening and shortening videos
• Play audio over videos
• Add stickers and animations
• Add special effects that alter the users body, eye color, hair color, etc.

Example of a duet

Live streaming

Users can live stream themselves either publicly or keep it limited to their followers.

Social sharing

Users have the capability of sharing their content edited on TikTok to other social media websites such as Instagram and Snapchat.

Soundtracks

The app has a library of songs that users can pick and choose fro to use as audio over their videos

Duet Option

Users have the option to take a video side by side another video so they can both be watched at the same time.

The Ethics of TikTok

Using the app is like being watched over your shoulder

Ethics of Surveillance

Unbenounced to many of its users, TikTok tracks the audio and browsing data every single one of its users^[7]. Not only does this action address unethical means of surveillance, but it also brings into question the transparency of the company and how they're not disclosing the true purpose of what they use this data for. To quote Chaim Gartenberg in his article "Reddit CEO says TikTok is ‘fundamentally parasitic,’" "TikTok parent company ByteDance claims that its fingerprinting techniques are used to identify malicious browser behavior, but Eberl notes his skepticism given that the website still appears to work perfectly fine when those scripts are disabled"^[7]. If the website is able to function perfectly even without using fingerprinting and tracking technology, it brings many concerns to what else the company could be doing with the information. Considering that the information is not crucial to the inner workings of the app, it shows a true breach of privacy for all of the community of users connected by the platform. When discussing this, it is important to mention Steve Mann's paper "Veillance and Reciprocal Transparency: Surveillance versus Sousveillance, AR Glass, Lifeglogging, and Wearable Computing" that determines ByteDance’s position is unethical. At the moment, ByteDance is executing a propertarian model of veillance; since the app is their property they are deciding to survey every action that happens on it. However, this is an unethical use of power for the company. To quote Mann "there is no reason to assume that those in high places(e.g. priests, politicians, police, etc.) are flawless and should thus be able to watch over us without us being able to watch back! Otherwise, the one-sided nature of surveillance allows it to, under certain circumstances, become the very “ladder” that facilitates this high-level corruption"^[8]. ByteDance is surveying its users with no opportunity for sousveillance. The company is putting itself at a high level of power, compromising the privacy of all people on the app. Being that the company won’t disclose their true reasoning for fingerprinting each user, they are exercising unethical behavior on behalf of the millions of people who interact with the company’s creation.

Cyberbullying

An example of one user bullying another user by comparing their image to the fictional character Humpty Dumpty

User to User

Much like other popular social media apps and websites being used, TikTok also acts as a hub for cyberbullies through its comment system, however, unlike any other app TikTok also has the duet feature that allows any user to make a video and play it side by side with another video made by a user. In the cases of cyberbullying through comments, People are able to make separate accounts and remain completely anonymous when commenting on any post. In cases where users are bullied from duets there is no way for them to delete the post without filing a complaint with TikTok. While users are able to either disable or delete comments from their post they are unable to prevent duets from being created which gives an open opportunity for cyberbullies. To quote Rachael Krishna in her article "TikTok Creators Say They Are Being Bullied And The Company Isn’t Helping", "When they do report abuse, users find that content either stays up or just keeps coming, meaning they spend more of their time reporting content than creating it"^[9]. While the app exercises ethical behavior by allowing users to restrict comments, they fail to stay consistent in upholding their good ethical behavior across the platform by allowing duets to keep getting created with no means to delete it unless TikTok employees are alerted to its presence.

ByteDance to User

The parent company ByteDance also acts as a cyberbully to a plethora of its users, instructing moderators to remove content that they find to be undesirable. To quote Joe Price "it has been revealed that TikTok moderators were told to suppress videos of people deemed too "ugly, poor, or disabled" in an effort to attract more people to download the app"^[10] The act of suppressing users based on their personal traits is extremely unethical. Bytedance is willing to risk silencing its own users in order to make the app more desirable for people to download. Not only does the app act as a hub for cyberbullies from user to user but the parent company also does the same. When considering the work of Philip Brey, ByteDance does not follow societal values for disclosive computer ethics, most specifically "Justice(Fairness, non-discrimination)"^[11]. The apps moderators are discriminating its own users, determining who should be seen or who should not based off of personal traits. ByteDance is practicing unethical behavior by discriminating users of the app.

Copyright

TikTok relies on a large library of music in order for users to make content day to day. Being that this is the case the app both allows users to add their own audio or use audio that is provided by the TikTok app. While the app contains a massive library of music for users to select from, much of the audio being presented is really available for the app to offer. To quote Stuart Dredge from Music Ally, "TikTok received 3,345 takedown notices for copyrighted content in the first half of 2019"^[12]. ByteDance allowing unlicensed music in its videos draws concerns of the company practicing unethical behavior, receiving success from the work of artists without giving them credit. To quote David Israelite the CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association(NMPA), "while some publishers have been able to negotiate with TikTok to license their catalogs, a large part of [the publishing] industry does not have agreements in place, meaning numerous works continue to be used unlawfully as the platform’s popularity grows exponentially"^[13]. Even though certain music creators are able to receive credit along with royalties there is still a large population of music creators that are not receiving the same level of compensation. This has become a large enough problem to the point that the NMPA has called on congress to investigate further into TikToks problem with copyrighted audio. In Joseph Millers "Hoisting reality" he quotes Professor Paul Goldstein saying "The aim of copyright law is to direct investment toward the production of abundant information"^[14]. By choosing not to license much of the music they use, TikTok is cheating music creators out of money that could go towards other projects therefore limiting investment toward further production. Analyzing the behavior and copyright infringement on many musical creators draws many concerns to the ethics being practiced by the app.

See Also

• Instagram
• Snapchat

External Links

References

1. ↑ https://99firms.com/blog/tiktok-statistics/#gref
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} https://digiday.com/media/everything-you-need-to-know-about-bytedance-the-company-behind-tiktok/
3. ↑ https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-musically-2016-5
4. ↑ https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-app-online-website-video-sharing-2019-7.
5. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok
6. ↑ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwezwj/how-does-tiktoks-for-you-page-work-users-have-some-wild-theories
7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1} https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21155845/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-tiktok-privacy-concerns-spyware-fingerprinting-tracking-users
8. ↑ http://wearcam.org/veillance/part1.pdf
9. ↑ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/krishrach/tik-tok-users-bullying-abuse-complaints
10. ↑ https://www.complex.com/life/2020/03/tiktok-moderators-told-to-censor-posts-from-poor-ugly-users
11. ↑ "Values in technology and disclosive computer ethics", Philip Brey
12. ↑ https://musically.com/2020/01/02/tiktok-says-it-received-3345-copyright-takedown-notices-in-2019/
13. ↑ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/nmpa-calls-for-scrutiny-of-tiktok-says-platform-has-consistently-violated-us-copyright-law-and-the-rights-of-songwriters-and-music-publishers/
14. ↑ "Hoisting Reality", Joseph Miller