TikTok has been called “digital crack cocaine”.
A news story from 2020 outlined how the Chinese social media firm had bulked up with an estimated new 682 million users in 2019, each of which were estimated to use the video site for 50 minutes a day because of the site’s addictive, personalised feed of short videos often soundtracked by a memeable music hit.
In 2022 that number is now estimated to be above one billion users, just in one month. In the US alone, TikTok has an estimated 142 million active users.
Tik Tok is the destination for mobile videos.
It is a mashup of two different apps – Musical.ly, which launched in China in 2014 and Douyin. Douyin’s owner, ByteDance, bought Musical.ly in 2018 and the rest is assuredly social media history.
Now, TikTokers are the ascendant social media stars and Tik Tok is the platform to use and watch – and that includes advertisers.
VidCon, the annual convention for social media creators, and those working in the online platform industry, was in 2022 dominated by stars from TikTok like Charli D’Amelio (who has 140 million followers) and Tik Tok took over from YouTube as the main sponsor of VidCon.
D’Amelio, who is mostly known as a dancer, is estimated to make US$150,000 for each post she makes on the social site. A recent Tik Tok rich list estimated the 18-year-old has amassed a US$28 million net worth.
Comedian Khabane Lame is hot on D’Amelio’s now-designer heels – he earns an estimated US$130,000 for each of his videos, and has overtaken D’Amelio as Tik Tok’s most followed – with 143 million people following him.
And now TikTokers are also flexing their power in another, new way and have a huge foe in their sights - and it's not another content platform. It is Amazon, the e-commerce giant.
On August 16 a website appeared, peopleoverprime.com.
It states at the top: Amazon is exploiting its workers and busting worker-led unionisation efforts. As of August 16th, 2022, creators all over TikTok are joining together to stand in solidarity with Amazon workers and union organisers by refusing to monetise our platforms for Amazon, including all direct Amazon sponsorships and usage of Amazon’s storefront.
The website says until demands set by the Amazon Labour Union and Amazon workers are met, “we will prevent Amazon from monetising the largest social media platform in the world”.
It says People over Prime consists of 70 creators with a following of 51 million people.
These creators are backing a $30 an hour minimum wage for Amazon workers, two paid 30 minute breaks and an hour-long paid lunch break, better medical leave, additional paid time off and “eliminating productivity rates that require workers to pick a certain number of items an hour”.
The site also asks the corporate behemoth to stop any and all union-busting tactics used by Amazon in the past, including compulsory anti-union meetings, promising better pay and benefits to employees if they vote against the union, threatening with worse pay and benefits or termination to employees if they voted for the union, and addressing specific issues employees have if they promised to vote against the union.
The Washington Post reported that the campaign is a setback for Amazon, which had attempted to cosy up to Tik Tokers and young influencers.
In 2017 it launched an Amazon Influencer Programme which saw influencers get a cut of sales of products they recommended to followers via their own Amazon shopfronts.
The post reported that as part of its plan to woo influencers it even whisked some of them away for a “luxurious retreat” in Mexico, and it also built a VIP lounge at VidCon, where they could learn about ways to work more closely with the retail giant.
We don’t know all of the TikTokers and influencers behind People over Prime, but the Washington Post story said those involved will be closing their Amazon shops and won’t take promo deals with Amazon in future. Amazon reportedly has influencers sign non disparagement agreements, meaning they are gagged from talking negatively about Amazon.
An influencer with more than 5 million followers, Emily Rayna Shaw, says Amazon offering influencers “life changing payouts” while refusing to pay their own workers is “extremely wrong”.
“I want to feel comfortable recommending Amazon products to my community because it is so reliable, but I can’t do so until I know that they are treating their workers fairly.”
Of course there is a hashtag, peopleoverprime, and a group organising behind the campaign, called Gen-Z for Change.
Gen-Z for Change deputy executive director Elise Joshi said creators are essential to Amazon’s marketing model, and creators, especially from Tik Tok, are Amazon’s “gateway to young people”.
“Amazon knows how much power creators have, and People Over Prime is meant to take that power back and insist they listen to the demands of the Amazon Labor Union," Joshi said.
She said Amazon isn't listening to the needs of workers, but it does care about its bottom line.
Amazon has been fighting against unionisation in its business. US corporations including Starbucks and Amazon are facing a wave of unionisation across the country. A recent Gallup poll found approval of labour unions in the US is at its highest point since 1965, with 77 percent of adults aged 18 through 34 supporting them.
In April this year more than 2600 workers at a Staten Island, New York Amazon warehouse voted to join Amazon’s first US union in a historic moment for union organisers.
A few days ago another Amazon facility, this one in Albany New York, filed for a union election. Another union vote at another New York Amazon outlet was lost in May.
Amazon has challenged the union’s win in New York, but workers are also attempting to organise in other states including Alabama, Kentucky and California.
And these anti-union moves aren’t sitting right with the TikTokers.
Jackie James, 19, a TikTok creator with 3.4 million followers, told the Washington Post she will not be doing deals with Amazon until it changes its ways.
“As an influencer, it’s important to choose the right companies to work with,” she said. “I don’t think that workers should be treated the way they are under Amazon.”
TikTok has also been fertile ground for those challenging Starbucks for its campaign against unions.
The coffee chain tried to hire non-unionised workers, which was a content gift for the TikTokers working with Gen-Z for change – the TikTokers filed out and sent an estimated 140,000 false job applications to attempt to flood Starbucks and swamp its systems and potentially genuine job applications.
And of course, this was all grounds for more videos for the influencers, and more mocking of the big bully corporations.
Who has ethics?
Now whether or not TikTok itself is an ethical platform is another issue.
The firm has also been in the news most recently because of fears the app’s browser can monitor users' keystrokes.
A Vienna-based researcher, Felix Krause, published research last week which said that when TikTok users navigate to a website through a link in the TikTok app it can monitor your activity outside the app.
This meant TikTok could see for example credit card numbers being punched into external sites, or even passwords, the researcher said.
“This is an active choice the company made,” Krause told media. “This is a non-trivial engineering task. This does not happen by mistake or randomly.”
Now TikTok hasn’t denied it, but rather claimed that the company isn’t using those features to track users, anyway.
"Like other platforms, we use an in-app browser to provide an optimal user experience, but the Javascript code in question is used only for debugging, troubleshooting and performance monitoring of that experience -- like checking how quickly a page loads or whether it crashes," spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said.
This is not the first security worry about TikTok, and it certainly won’t be the last.
In July users of the app were warned the Chinese government could use the app to harvest personal information from in-app messages to working out where they are.
A cybersecurity firm, Internet 2.0, warned that TikTok uses excessive data harvesting in an “overly intrusive” way.
The firm claimed TikTok had significantly more permissions to do things than it needed to, including accessing calendars, scanning hard drives and working out where devices are located.
It also claimed Chinese authorities can access device data through the app.
TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has consistently denied the claims levelled at it, but media reported in July of 2022 TikTok Australia admitted staff in China were able to access Australian data.
Earlier this year nine Republican US senators wrote a letter to the firm expressing concern the app gives Chinese officials “backdoor access” to user data.
And Brendan Carr, the commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission called on the CEOs of Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores.
In a letter dated June 24, 2022 Carr told Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai that "TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing's apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data."
Of course New Zealanders are also enjoying TikTok, and have also been warned by government communications minister Andrew Little to be wary of apps which originated in China, while Parliament’s speaker Trevor Mallard warned MPs against downloading TikTok on their work devices.
11 Comments
D’Amelio, who is mostly known as a dancer, is estimated to make US$150,000 for each post she makes on the social site. A recent Tik Tok rich list estimated the 18-year-old has amassed a US$28 million net worth.
When people ask why I have lost all faith in humanity it is because society values someone who dances a little bit over someone who teaches the next generation or saves peoples lives.
Teachers and MPs used to have pretty comparable salaries, didn't they?
We seem to have been undervaluing our teachers - and our medical workers - for quite some time now, choosing instead to incentivise and support speculators. This seems not much further an extension of such values.
Social media in general is a scourge. The grip it has over people's lives is insane. If people are prepared to steal cars just because TikTok said so, then they can be convinced to do just about anything.
Remember though that it's the platform which has the power, not the users. Algorithms largely determine what you get to see, and censorship determines what you don't. If TikTok decides they don't like Amazon for some reason, it's not hard to convince millions of users that they shouldn't like them either.
As for data mining, they hardly have to be sneaky about it. People are more than willing to hand everything over for the sake of a few likes. Every selfie you take is processed and facial recognition data stored, normally under the guise of some banal feature like automatic photo tagging or hands-free authentication. What happens with that data afterwards is anyone's guess, but the potential implications are pretty dire.
Perhaps the biggest mistake one can make, however, is to assume that it's only the Chinese who are doing it.
What's interesting is that many leading figures in the industry don't let their children onto social media (according to essays and books on the topic, quoting from them). Add the lootboxes in gaming (still not banned in NZ?) and it's staggering how much effort has been put into making money off children through pretty exploitative technology.
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