Monday, March 11, 2019

How TikTok Is Rewriting the World | NYT

Also be sure to read the fine print about data privacy...
"In What Laboratory Was This Monster Made?

TikTok is far from an evolutionary fluke. Its parent company, ByteDance, recently valued at more than $75 billion dollars, bills itself first as an artificial intelligence company, not a creator of mission-driven social platforms. TikTok was merged with Musical.ly, a social network initially built around lip-syncing and dancing and adopted by very young people. It still carries a lot of Musical.ly’s DNA, and its app store reviews contain more than a little yearning for Musical.ly’s return. It was the defunct Musical.ly against which the Federal Trade Commission recently levied its largest-ever penalty for mishandling the private data of young users.

“ByteDance’s content platforms enable people to enjoy content powered by AI technology,” its website says. Its vision is “to build global creation and interaction platforms.” ByteDance’s wildly popular news and entertainment portal, Jinri Toutiao (translated as “Today’s Headlines,”) relies heavily on AI — not human editors, or a self-selected feed of accounts — to curate and create customized streams of largely user-and-partner-generated content tailored to each of its readers."
How TikTok Is Rewriting the World | NYT

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