4 ms·

TikTok's new feature will track your emotions to sell ads

46 points by nabla9 4y ago

hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
Just don't use this sucker. It's poisonous.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Something like that has been said about every technological advancement ever created.
  - vmoore 4y ago
    I refuse to download TikT0k. I won't even use the web app version. It fingerprints your browser, which should be a banned practice, but they get away with it and have no accountability. YouTube has ripped TikT0k 'best of TikT0k' videos so I'm not missing out really.
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      > YouTube has ripped TikT0k 'best of TikT0k' videos so I'm not missing out really. Arguably, the great part about TikTok isn't the content itself but the recommendation algorithm. It's really good at showing you new things that you wouldn't have looked at on your own, but that are still interesting to you. Youtube shorts is getting closer though, TikTok can't keep their edge forever.
  - anononaut 4y ago
    Most technological advances haven't been explicitly for the purpose of collecting information about the gullible, addicted masses. Nor have they been easier to avoid.
  - akprasad 4y ago
    Indeed: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paint - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
  - electrondood 4y ago
    And yet there is ample evidence that TikTok results in societal harm. Adolescents who don't have Tourette's are displaying severe tics from TikTok use [0], for just a start. [0] https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2022/06/03/tiktok-tics https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2022/06/03/tiktok-tics
- blindriver 4y ago
  I have a large investment in Meta and Snap in anticipation of TikTok getting banned in 2023.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
> TikTok says it will ensure that ads are placed in front of users who are “truly paying attention” and that brands will only pay for ads if a user has “voluntarily” watched it for at least six seconds, or has interacted with it within the first six seconds. So that's interesting. What are advertisers going to do to lure me into watching ads for longer than 6 seconds? Tiktok makes it extremely easy to flip through videos instantly and I'll often (not always) judge I don't like a video in under two seconds. > With this pay-if-they-engage feature, TikTok is making bold claims that are either dubious and unscientific or selling an invasion of privacy – or both. In claiming that ads will be delivered to “emotionally” and “tangibly” engaged users, TikTok is suggesting it could read people’s emotions. However, it fails to provide details on how the feature would actually work. To date the only technologies that purport to gather such precise, highly sensitive data are what are called “emotion recognition” technologies. > Experts have repeatedly criticized “emotion recognition” as unverified pseudo-science that, even if it were possible, would result in highly intrusive forms of surveillance. Yet, TikTok has commissioned various projects on emotion recognition, even delving into contentious neurotechnology / neuromarketing approaches. For instance, TikTok conducted a study in partnership with MediaScience which creepily resembles what Focused View claims to be able to do. I have fun with Tiktok but it will never get camera, microphone, or contacts access on my iPhone. Could it be measuring the gesture used to swipe? Angry swipes might be different than non-angry swipes, for example.
- hourago 4y ago
  > So that's interesting. What are advertisers going to do to lure me into watching ads for longer than 6 seconds? Tiktok makes it extremely easy to flip through videos instantly and I'll often (not always) judge I don't like a video in under two seconds. TikTok will push ads that grab people attention. That will cause ads to become more extreme, what will create a race to the bottom on grab attention ads. If you though that ads have gotten more obnoxious during the years wait until they are hyper-optimized by the second.
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    Tiktok ads are so easy to skip I barely notice them.
tony_antony 4y ago
Yet another extension of what Zuckerberg unleashed.
- infecto 4y ago
  Not fair to blame Zuckerberg for this.
  - Razengan 4y ago
    Google started this didn't they? Making the users the products?
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Tom from Myspace did it before Zuckerberg.
super256 4y ago
> TikTok is suggesting it could read people’s emotions I assume that isn’t too hard for a company which has a big and well labeled dataset? I’m pretty confident that Spotify knows exactly when I’m sad, because at those times I like to listen to very certain music. I’m also sure that Google has the same capabilities (and is probably implicitly using them already, as their ad model automatically tests the ad’s performance across different groups?)
SOTGO 4y ago
This whole article is a mess. There are no details except that there will be a change to the payment model for advertising. The article just fearmongers about “emotion recognition” which it isn't even clear TikTok is trying to do. To me it seems like TikTok is trying to emulate the skippable ad pay structure from YouTube, where advertisers only pay if the user chooses to watch past the point that they can skip. There are obvious privacy concerns with TikTok, but without more details this seems like a severe overreaction.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- winternett 4y ago
  None of these platforms really seem to be algorithm driven to me at all. I spent pretty much all of last year creating and uploading content, and also watching content on TikTok, and if you ask me, I think most of the content is controlled simply by keywords that moderators tag onto videos and whether or not the poster pays to promote a post. There were even reports that manual post visibility boosting was an option that moderators at TikTok frequently use. If the platforms can pre-select what goes viral, then nothing you see is organic at all, and it only gets worse and more unfair to creators that don't pay for visibility as profit making becomes the primary focus for any social platform. These platforms run teams of content moderators to tag posts within seconds of their upload... Despite faster than ever mobile networks and ultra-compressed video files, content often takes longer than normal to upload for this very reason. With a quick manual review and (taxonomy) tagging solution, content can be grouped in any number of ways for tailored playback by partially scripted (not necessarily algorithmic) methods. Money generated from content on the platform is carefully engineered to make certain sounds (which are used to track royalties) most popular on TikTok. The process of selecting a popular sound for most videos means that a huge amount of the royalty payments go to only a few owners of the most popular sounds on the platform (This also explains why certain sounds repeat constantly even though you choose not to hear them any more or block them in controls). There is little intelligence in what TikTok plays for people from what I observe, the reason why TikTok looks intelligent is that they heavily gaslight content creators on their potential for success on the platform, and frequently make posting competitive and challenging to dictate what creators post. The end result is a vast stream of daily (relatively high quality and topical) free content generated by legions of young (and even old people) who are desperate to be seen, in hopes that it will earn them income. The platform also creates a competition between rich and poor, in which trust fund kids (and drug dealers) can pay vast sums of money to dominate the for-you feed and to gain tons of followers, while middle and lower class participants are encouraged to think that content is viral and liked for fair reasons or because the posters know secrets that no one else does. Many people are dropping from using the most dominant platforms now because they've spent time chasing the schemes and found that there is no reward after long periods of hard work. These sites are run like the lottery now, and manipulated like casinos, where only a few people are permitted to win, primarily to encourage others to play, and where the super rich, connected and influential people, and platform owners are usually the only potential big winners.. Children are the worst victims of this social media culture now, because in the process of creating content and being encouraged to participate, they waste time out of their lives not doing more rewarding things, they can get exploited by others in the process, they also suffer the mental stress of being manipulated and viewing things they're not ready for, and they often resort to oversharing and being sexualized in the competitive environment in hopes of popularity that, more often than not, is not rewarded or that returns little long-term career value.
crmd 4y ago
TikTok is the first piece of computer software that I'm treating like a dangerous and currently legal recreational drug. No doubt lots of fun, obviously not good for you, don't need it, so simply not gonna use it.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >TikTok is the first piece of computer software that I'm treating like a dangerous and currently legal recreational drug. It's the fentanyl to Facebook's heroin. The crack to Instagram's cocaine. More of the same idea, with an unimaginably more destructive and addictive quality emergent from its' purity, quantity, and availability.
  - cptcobalt 4y ago
    This. It's not a net-new presence, but very perfectly tuned to catch emotions well.
- criddell 4y ago
  Back in the 90's, I had a bad Tetris habit. I was in college at the time and missed quite a few classes because of it. I used to dream about falling Tetris pieces.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    More recent for me was Factorio. I had to remove it from my Steam library entirely because I'd lose days per week otherwise.
  - bejd 4y ago
    That's called "the Tetris effect" [0]. It was later used as the title for a game in the series. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
wkat4242 4y ago
I wonder how they plan to actually do this. iOS now identifies when the camera or micrphone is turned on even when permission was previously given. Some Android builds do the same. So I'm sure this will come out really quickly. I've never actually used TikTok and I never will. I get a lot of videos sent through by people stamped with their logo and they're always of the 'stupid time-wasting joke' kind of thing. The things people used to send as animated gifs. And I'm very much drawn to written content over video anyway when it comes to learning. But it's worrying from a population manipulation point of view. The same way Facebook did with Cambridge Analytica.
- hbn 4y ago
  Oh there's no way they're gonna use the camera or microphone. I assume they'd be trying to associate in-app behaviours to emotions. e.g. times you're opening the app, perhaps types of messages you're sending in their in-app messenger, maybe they'll seed you different types of videos in your feed and see which ones you're engaging with at the moment (the user is happy cause they stuck around for the cute puppy video. The user is angry because they watched and commented on a video about how JK Rowling eats puppies. etc etc) Though none of this stuff really has to be directly tied to emotions. As long as they can link up user behavior to which ads are working, that's all that matters. If they're really calling it "emotion tracking" it's probably just a cute sales pitch to sell to advertisers.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Yeah this is all stuff that Facebook is doing already. I tested it recently by creating an account (so there is no pre-existing information) and pausing during scrolling through the ads and suggested nonsense (there was nothing else to show as I hadn't added any friends). I paused on a video of a fish and I could instantly see the next video being replaced by a similar one. I suppose some people could argue that this is for the user's benefit, to show them content they're interested in. But I find it very sneaky. I personally don't want to see any suggested content, only the people I subscribe to.
hcks 4y ago
The amount of fear and scaremongering surrounding TikTok baffles me
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ok123456 4y ago
[flagged]
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  That's not what gaslighting means.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Stop gaslighting me.
Proven 4y ago
[dead]
timvisee 4y ago
> TikTok, when will you finally learn? No. Users, when will you finally learn?
- fsflover 4y ago
  No. Regulators, when will you finally start doing useful work?
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    Regulators have never been able to keep up with the speed at which people can do damage. At some point, people have to exercise their own judgment.
    - fsflover 4y ago
      And this also never works in practice. It should be both of course.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Do you think regulation is viable? Arguments will likely be made that cigarettes and tobacco are still legal despite all the restrictions, therefore there's only so much regulation that can be applied to TikTok. There can be age restrictions, yes, but age restrictions can be bypassed by teenagers of even middling intelligence, and TikTok can make sure it only advertises to "adults." I don't see regulation doing much except making the world a more twisted place than before. If we're going to legislate, it should be in the way of working with the culture and not so much the tech. What is regulation but adding more tech to the problem? More tech often isn't better.
    - fsflover 4y ago
      Are you saying that currently existing regulations of tobacco do not save lives?
      - 4y ago
mig39 4y ago
Is this like Youtube's "Skippable" and "Non-skipable" ads? ie: you only pay for an ad if it wasn't skipped? Pay extra to have it not skipped? The emotions would be like ... if a person watches the entire ad? If they interact with it? On TikTok, if I see the same ad a few times, I'll flag it as "not interested" or "saw it too many times already" etc.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the thing that ran Tiktok out of the US are class action lawsuits due to all of the scams their ad department promotes. For example, scroll for any period of time and you will find multiple ads for bean bag chairs, all for much lower prices than you can find at Amazon, and all originating from the exact same "company," with the exact same set of Judge.me ratings on each of their hastily assembled websites (which all have non-working links to the same social media properties). If you search for "bean bag scam," you will find hundreds of users complaining that they were scammed out of money by this company. Tiktok does nothing and gleefully allows these scammers to continue suckering people out of their money.
electrondood 4y ago
I envision a dystopian future when transformer-based AI models will monitor the user and generate custom advertisements in realtime, optimizing for maximum attention-holding and behavioral influence at the level of an individual user. Human attention is a commodity. TikTok is an exploitative drug.
- 6510 4y ago
  AI told me to do it.
fpiacenza 4y ago
This is bs. I work in Paid Media (Ads). Focused View on TikTok means user has watched at least 6s, or interact with the Ad. This is TikTok's version of YouTube TrueView, which counts a View as watching 30s or interacting with the Ad. The part about "emotions" is how the advertiser is supposed to generated more focused views: by creating ads that are emotionally appealing, the users chooses to watch longer, not TikTok.

46 points by nabla9 4y ago

hnthrowaway0315 4y ago

Just don't use this sucker. It's poisonous.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Something like that has been said about every technological advancement ever created.
- vmoore 4y ago
  I refuse to download TikT0k. I won't even use the web app version. It fingerprints your browser, which should be a banned practice, but they get away with it and have no accountability. YouTube has ripped TikT0k 'best of TikT0k' videos so I'm not missing out really.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    > YouTube has ripped TikT0k 'best of TikT0k' videos so I'm not missing out really. Arguably, the great part about TikTok isn't the content itself but the recommendation algorithm. It's really good at showing you new things that you wouldn't have looked at on your own, but that are still interesting to you. Youtube shorts is getting closer though, TikTok can't keep their edge forever.
- anononaut 4y ago
  Most technological advances haven't been explicitly for the purpose of collecting information about the gullible, addicted masses. Nor have they been easier to avoid.
- akprasad 4y ago
  Indeed: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paint - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
- electrondood 4y ago
  And yet there is ample evidence that TikTok results in societal harm. Adolescents who don't have Tourette's are displaying severe tics from TikTok use [0], for just a start. [0] https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2022/06/03/tiktok-tics https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2022/06/03/tiktok-tics
blindriver 4y ago
I have a large investment in Meta and Snap in anticipation of TikTok getting banned in 2023.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

> TikTok says it will ensure that ads are placed in front of users who are “truly paying attention” and that brands will only pay for ads if a user has “voluntarily” watched it for at least six seconds, or has interacted with it within the first six seconds. So that's interesting. What are advertisers going to do to lure me into watching ads for longer than 6 seconds? Tiktok makes it extremely easy to flip through videos instantly and I'll often (not always) judge I don't like a video in under two seconds. > With this pay-if-they-engage feature, TikTok is making bold claims that are either dubious and unscientific or selling an invasion of privacy – or both. In claiming that ads will be delivered to “emotionally” and “tangibly” engaged users, TikTok is suggesting it could read people’s emotions. However, it fails to provide details on how the feature would actually work. To date the only technologies that purport to gather such precise, highly sensitive data are what are called “emotion recognition” technologies. > Experts have repeatedly criticized “emotion recognition” as unverified pseudo-science that, even if it were possible, would result in highly intrusive forms of surveillance. Yet, TikTok has commissioned various projects on emotion recognition, even delving into contentious neurotechnology / neuromarketing approaches. For instance, TikTok conducted a study in partnership with MediaScience which creepily resembles what Focused View claims to be able to do. I have fun with Tiktok but it will never get camera, microphone, or contacts access on my iPhone. Could it be measuring the gesture used to swipe? Angry swipes might be different than non-angry swipes, for example.

hourago 4y ago
> So that's interesting. What are advertisers going to do to lure me into watching ads for longer than 6 seconds? Tiktok makes it extremely easy to flip through videos instantly and I'll often (not always) judge I don't like a video in under two seconds. TikTok will push ads that grab people attention. That will cause ads to become more extreme, what will create a race to the bottom on grab attention ads. If you though that ads have gotten more obnoxious during the years wait until they are hyper-optimized by the second.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Tiktok ads are so easy to skip I barely notice them.

tony_antony 4y ago

Yet another extension of what Zuckerberg unleashed.

infecto 4y ago
Not fair to blame Zuckerberg for this.
- Razengan 4y ago
  Google started this didn't they? Making the users the products?
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Tom from Myspace did it before Zuckerberg.

super256 4y ago

> TikTok is suggesting it could read people’s emotions I assume that isn’t too hard for a company which has a big and well labeled dataset? I’m pretty confident that Spotify knows exactly when I’m sad, because at those times I like to listen to very certain music. I’m also sure that Google has the same capabilities (and is probably implicitly using them already, as their ad model automatically tests the ad’s performance across different groups?)

SOTGO 4y ago

This whole article is a mess. There are no details except that there will be a change to the payment model for advertising. The article just fearmongers about “emotion recognition” which it isn't even clear TikTok is trying to do. To me it seems like TikTok is trying to emulate the skippable ad pay structure from YouTube, where advertisers only pay if the user chooses to watch past the point that they can skip. There are obvious privacy concerns with TikTok, but without more details this seems like a severe overreaction.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
winternett 4y ago
None of these platforms really seem to be algorithm driven to me at all. I spent pretty much all of last year creating and uploading content, and also watching content on TikTok, and if you ask me, I think most of the content is controlled simply by keywords that moderators tag onto videos and whether or not the poster pays to promote a post. There were even reports that manual post visibility boosting was an option that moderators at TikTok frequently use. If the platforms can pre-select what goes viral, then nothing you see is organic at all, and it only gets worse and more unfair to creators that don't pay for visibility as profit making becomes the primary focus for any social platform. These platforms run teams of content moderators to tag posts within seconds of their upload... Despite faster than ever mobile networks and ultra-compressed video files, content often takes longer than normal to upload for this very reason. With a quick manual review and (taxonomy) tagging solution, content can be grouped in any number of ways for tailored playback by partially scripted (not necessarily algorithmic) methods. Money generated from content on the platform is carefully engineered to make certain sounds (which are used to track royalties) most popular on TikTok. The process of selecting a popular sound for most videos means that a huge amount of the royalty payments go to only a few owners of the most popular sounds on the platform (This also explains why certain sounds repeat constantly even though you choose not to hear them any more or block them in controls). There is little intelligence in what TikTok plays for people from what I observe, the reason why TikTok looks intelligent is that they heavily gaslight content creators on their potential for success on the platform, and frequently make posting competitive and challenging to dictate what creators post. The end result is a vast stream of daily (relatively high quality and topical) free content generated by legions of young (and even old people) who are desperate to be seen, in hopes that it will earn them income. The platform also creates a competition between rich and poor, in which trust fund kids (and drug dealers) can pay vast sums of money to dominate the for-you feed and to gain tons of followers, while middle and lower class participants are encouraged to think that content is viral and liked for fair reasons or because the posters know secrets that no one else does. Many people are dropping from using the most dominant platforms now because they've spent time chasing the schemes and found that there is no reward after long periods of hard work. These sites are run like the lottery now, and manipulated like casinos, where only a few people are permitted to win, primarily to encourage others to play, and where the super rich, connected and influential people, and platform owners are usually the only potential big winners.. Children are the worst victims of this social media culture now, because in the process of creating content and being encouraged to participate, they waste time out of their lives not doing more rewarding things, they can get exploited by others in the process, they also suffer the mental stress of being manipulated and viewing things they're not ready for, and they often resort to oversharing and being sexualized in the competitive environment in hopes of popularity that, more often than not, is not rewarded or that returns little long-term career value.

crmd 4y ago

TikTok is the first piece of computer software that I'm treating like a dangerous and currently legal recreational drug. No doubt lots of fun, obviously not good for you, don't need it, so simply not gonna use it.

ramesh31 4y ago
>TikTok is the first piece of computer software that I'm treating like a dangerous and currently legal recreational drug. It's the fentanyl to Facebook's heroin. The crack to Instagram's cocaine. More of the same idea, with an unimaginably more destructive and addictive quality emergent from its' purity, quantity, and availability.
- cptcobalt 4y ago
  This. It's not a net-new presence, but very perfectly tuned to catch emotions well.
criddell 4y ago
Back in the 90's, I had a bad Tetris habit. I was in college at the time and missed quite a few classes because of it. I used to dream about falling Tetris pieces.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  More recent for me was Factorio. I had to remove it from my Steam library entirely because I'd lose days per week otherwise.
- bejd 4y ago
  That's called "the Tetris effect" [0]. It was later used as the title for a game in the series. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

wkat4242 4y ago

I wonder how they plan to actually do this. iOS now identifies when the camera or micrphone is turned on even when permission was previously given. Some Android builds do the same. So I'm sure this will come out really quickly. I've never actually used TikTok and I never will. I get a lot of videos sent through by people stamped with their logo and they're always of the 'stupid time-wasting joke' kind of thing. The things people used to send as animated gifs. And I'm very much drawn to written content over video anyway when it comes to learning. But it's worrying from a population manipulation point of view. The same way Facebook did with Cambridge Analytica.

hbn 4y ago
Oh there's no way they're gonna use the camera or microphone. I assume they'd be trying to associate in-app behaviours to emotions. e.g. times you're opening the app, perhaps types of messages you're sending in their in-app messenger, maybe they'll seed you different types of videos in your feed and see which ones you're engaging with at the moment (the user is happy cause they stuck around for the cute puppy video. The user is angry because they watched and commented on a video about how JK Rowling eats puppies. etc etc) Though none of this stuff really has to be directly tied to emotions. As long as they can link up user behavior to which ads are working, that's all that matters. If they're really calling it "emotion tracking" it's probably just a cute sales pitch to sell to advertisers.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Yeah this is all stuff that Facebook is doing already. I tested it recently by creating an account (so there is no pre-existing information) and pausing during scrolling through the ads and suggested nonsense (there was nothing else to show as I hadn't added any friends). I paused on a video of a fish and I could instantly see the next video being replaced by a similar one. I suppose some people could argue that this is for the user's benefit, to show them content they're interested in. But I find it very sneaky. I personally don't want to see any suggested content, only the people I subscribe to.

hcks 4y ago

The amount of fear and scaremongering surrounding TikTok baffles me

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ok123456 4y ago

[flagged]

thesuitonym 4y ago
That's not what gaslighting means.
- ok123456 4y ago
  Stop gaslighting me.

Proven 4y ago

[dead]

timvisee 4y ago

> TikTok, when will you finally learn? No. Users, when will you finally learn?

fsflover 4y ago
No. Regulators, when will you finally start doing useful work?
- karaterobot 4y ago
  Regulators have never been able to keep up with the speed at which people can do damage. At some point, people have to exercise their own judgment.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    And this also never works in practice. It should be both of course.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Do you think regulation is viable? Arguments will likely be made that cigarettes and tobacco are still legal despite all the restrictions, therefore there's only so much regulation that can be applied to TikTok. There can be age restrictions, yes, but age restrictions can be bypassed by teenagers of even middling intelligence, and TikTok can make sure it only advertises to "adults." I don't see regulation doing much except making the world a more twisted place than before. If we're going to legislate, it should be in the way of working with the culture and not so much the tech. What is regulation but adding more tech to the problem? More tech often isn't better.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    Are you saying that currently existing regulations of tobacco do not save lives?
    - 4y ago

mig39 4y ago

Is this like Youtube's "Skippable" and "Non-skipable" ads? ie: you only pay for an ad if it wasn't skipped? Pay extra to have it not skipped? The emotions would be like ... if a person watches the entire ad? If they interact with it? On TikTok, if I see the same ad a few times, I'll flag it as "not interested" or "saw it too many times already" etc.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the thing that ran Tiktok out of the US are class action lawsuits due to all of the scams their ad department promotes. For example, scroll for any period of time and you will find multiple ads for bean bag chairs, all for much lower prices than you can find at Amazon, and all originating from the exact same "company," with the exact same set of Judge.me ratings on each of their hastily assembled websites (which all have non-working links to the same social media properties). If you search for "bean bag scam," you will find hundreds of users complaining that they were scammed out of money by this company. Tiktok does nothing and gleefully allows these scammers to continue suckering people out of their money.

electrondood 4y ago

I envision a dystopian future when transformer-based AI models will monitor the user and generate custom advertisements in realtime, optimizing for maximum attention-holding and behavioral influence at the level of an individual user. Human attention is a commodity. TikTok is an exploitative drug.

6510 4y ago
AI told me to do it.

fpiacenza 4y ago

This is bs. I work in Paid Media (Ads). Focused View on TikTok means user has watched at least 6s, or interact with the Ad. This is TikTok's version of YouTube TrueView, which counts a View as watching 30s or interacting with the Ad. The part about "emotions" is how the advertiser is supposed to generated more focused views: by creating ads that are emotionally appealing, the users chooses to watch longer, not TikTok.