Useful TikTok History: An Honest Mirror
April 21, 2022
I rejected an example of TikTok psychological nudging for my upcoming National Cyber Crime Conference. The example focuses on what is called “wlw.” If you are not familiar with this three letter designation, you can test it in a number of apps popular with young people. One interesting application of the designator is YouTube. A young person can enter “wlw” and quickly be offered a playlist of “women loving women” videos. YouTube repackaging TikTok videos? No big deal.
The write up explains the logic of TikTok too:
“Chinese tech culture is not the enemy. Chinese tech culture is an honest mirror.”
The write up “TikTok’s Parent, ByteDance, Made Fake Accounts with Content Scraped from Instagram and Snapchat, Former Employees Say.” The essay does not talk about “wlw” or related videos. What it does explain is the building blocks of the TikTok mechanism for identifying magnetic content and how that magnetic content can be used to keep users engaged.
I spotted several interesting statements in the write up; to wit:
How to train for maximum American user appeal: “the scraped content was used to train ByteDance’s powerful “For You” personalization algorithm on US-based content so that it would better reflect the preferences of US users.”
The role of the mimic tactic: “an employee lays out the reasons that the company used “fake accounts” and scraped content; among them were that the accounts could be used to test which content performed best on the platform, and that current users could mimic the scraped content to improve their own popularity.”
Jazzing creators: “…the company manipulated like and video view counts displayed in the app to make creators believe they were more popular than they were.”
The influence of the US tech cowboy culture: “”The US public and US media often attribute unethical growth strategies practiced by Chinese tech companies to ‘Chinese tech culture,’ when very often those tactics are directly copied from FAANG companies…”
TikTok’s current posture: “While we disagree with the assertions, rather than go through lengthy litigation, we’d like to focus our efforts on building a safe and joyful experience for the TikTok community.”
Interesting insight into TikTok, an online service which some in Sillycon Valley think is innocuous, good clean fun, and not set up to nudge young people’s behavior. “Wlw”? No big deal, right? YouTube emulates TikTok; TikTok emulates American models. Synergistic indeed.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2022
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