Dakota Fink didn’t mean to spread a lie. Honestly, she didn’t.
It was May 2021 and the 23-year-old LA-based model was wearing a face mask. “I was thinking I needed to be more involved with TikTok,” she says. So she decided to record a video as a joke: She’d pull off the flesh-coloured face mask on camera, and subtitle it with a claim that women had to peel layers of their skin off after their period.
But assertions that Tate’s rise is a product of today’s young men and their views are wrong. In fact, Tate repeatedly failed to build a personal brand until TikTok gave him the means to saturate news feeds.
Archives of his website show that his business and his pitch to young men was the same four years ago as it is today. As far back as 2019, his website promised courses that would “have your girlfriend obey every command”.
So if Tate’s ambitions and pitch to young men have stayed the same, what changed? The answer lies in how Tate learned to game TikTok’s algorithm, allowing his content to flood millions of news feeds.
Information from Ineqe
TikTok has released a new (but familiar!) feature within their app called ‘TikTok Now’. Our online safety experts have taken a look to assess what TikTok Now is, the safeguarding concerns that come with it, and the comparisons it has to the popular photo sharing app BeReal.
..Because her videos weren’t getting many views, she felt it “wasn’t a big deal” to have a public account to showcase her family’s life during lockdown, with many of the videos featuring her and her daughters dancing around the house.
The comments she got on the video, many of which revolved around her daughter’s appearance, “horrified” her.
TikTok is raising its minimum age for livestreaming from 16 to 18 from next month.
A BBC News investigation found hundreds of accounts going live from Syrian refugee camps, with children begging for donations.
Some were receiving up to $1,000 (£900) an hour - but when they withdrew the cash, TikTok had taken up to 70%.
In future, only adults would be able to "send virtual gifts or access monetisation features", TikTok said.
It is unclear how TikTok will enforce these age restrictions, however.
The NewsGuard investigation found that for a sampling of searches on prominent news topics, almost 20 percent of the videos presented as search results contained misinformation. This means that for searches on topics ranging from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to school shootings and COVID vaccines, TikTok’s users are consistently fed false and misleading claims.
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