Production time varies from as little as ten minutes to as much as two hours, depending on the video. Former moderators said flagged videos were either deleted outright or subtly blocked from appearing on the streams through which most videos are seen and shared. They were also instructed to block or remove posts including profanity, discussion of legal marijuana and the artwork of Georgia O’Keeffe, whose flower paintings have been famously compared to female genitalia. In early July, it pulled out of the Google and Apple app stores in Hong Kong, following the implementation of a new sedition law in the Chinese special administrative region. They claim they don’t censor. Todas las noticias sobre TikTok publicadas en EL PAÍS. The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. The Washington Post’s slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness,” but for the last several months the paper revels in lightness on the youth-skewing social media platform TikTok. We’ve been invited and we want to get invited back. The best TikTok content for brands and influencers is both educational and entertaining. It’s not just playing out in the U.S.: Last month, India banned TikTok and several apps from China, citing security concerns. Former employees who spoke with The Post said they struggled with cultural conflicts, shifting guidelines and inconsistencies in how TikTok handled content for U.S. audiences. Facing scrutiny for its privacy practices, TikTok in July retained consultants at the cybersecurity firm Special Counsel to analyze the app’s source code and data-storage practices. I hate it here #tiktokbanned #tiktokban #gay #politics #facebook #boomers, “Protecting the privacy of our users’ data is of the utmost importance to TikTok,” said spokeswoman Ashley Nash-Hahn. The Post talked to six since-departed workers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. Browser extensions: Add-ons and plug-ins can see and share everything you do on the Web. “There’s been cartoons in [newspapers] for 300 years, technically,” he said. Triller: markellwashington1 Insta: Markell Washington Sc: markell123 TikTok is a social network that almost seems built to repel grownups. Use TikTok to … When your ultimate bosses are in China, it’s hard to resist China’s restrictive view of acceptable speech. app developers at a company called Mysk discovered, banned for use on official devices by the U.S. Army. (Jesse Dittmar for The Washington Post) Lawmakers have urged U.S. officials to investigate what they called “a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore.”. Should you delete the TikTok app — or force your kids to? Just remember: companies in China probably make your phone, laptop and TV, too. The Washington Post currently stands as one of TikTok’s marquee news partners – apparent proof that serious journalism and viral, humour-led … Convening a congressional hearing Tuesday — a session at which TikTok officials declined to testify — Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) 910.1K Fans. The Washington Post isn't a regular newspaper, it's a cool newspaper.. As supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, social media responded in real time to the unfolding events. Got a question about data privacy? Contribute-what-you-can tickets start at $5. The former employees said their attempts to persuade Chinese teams not to block or penalize certain videos were routinely ignored, out of caution about the Chinese government’s restrictions and previous penalties on other ByteDance apps. My colleagues Drew Harwell and Tony Romm reported last year that former U.S. employees bristled at commands to restrict videos that Beijing-based teams had deemed subversive or controversial. @washingtonpostAMC may have been bailed out by the actions of the wallstreetbets subreddit ##stonks ##stocks ##gamestop ##reddit ♬ original sound - We are a newspaper. The short-video app has become a global phenomenon and taken young American audiences by storm, blending silly jokes, stunts and personal stories into a tech powerhouse downloaded more than 1.3 billion times worldwide. The event will be recorded and posted online sometime afterward, but Cap Times members will have an exclusive chance to see the discussion live and pose questions to Jorgenson. The government did that in 2019 with dating app Grindr, which had been purchased by a firm in China. Our journalists tell stories for you to enjoy however you want, on all your devices. Most went to cloud services such as Amazon Web Services. Unlike its Western social media rivals, TikTok is strikingly light on the political and social topics that much of the world is commenting on — including, as some researchers told The Post in September, a dearth of content related to the Hong Kong protests that China has fiercely fought to undermine. The former workers said they often felt subordinate to their Chinese managers and co-workers, who followed different rules of acceptable speech and often declined to explain why they’d blocked certain videos or ideas. But some said they grew concerned after being told to flag videos deemed potentially culturally problematic, even if the content was generally acceptable in the United States. Des éditeurs comme The Washington Post ont accumulé plus de 400 000 abonnés en moins d’un an, se positionnant comme une puissance créative et en déplaçant leur portée vers une nouvelle population plus globale et plus jeune dans le processus. A subscription to The Washington Post is like having an entire newsroom working around the clock — and around the world — to bring you the information you need to make sense of a changing world. Jorgenson (whose Twitter handle is Washington Post TikTok Guy) will be talking with Opoien on Wednesday, April 14, 7-8 p.m. on Zoom. A set of internal company guidelines, published by the Guardian newspaper in September, instructed TikTok moderators to ban videos and topics in line with Chinese-government censorship policies, including the “distortion” of historic events such as “Tiananmen Square incidents”; “criticism/attack” of countries’ policies or social rules, including the “socialism system”; and discussion of “highly controversial topics,” which the rules said included the independence of Tibet and Taiwan. The U.S. has repeatedly accused it of espionage, including the 2017 hack of the Equifax credit reporting agency. Nobody reads privacy policies. TikTok has been downloaded more than 120 million times in the United States, and it has regularly outranked its top competitors, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, on the Apple and Google app stores, according to data from research firm Sensor Tower. But there’s scant evidence that TikTok is sharing our data with China, and we should be wary of xenophobia dressed up as privacy concerns. “TikTok has grown quickly, much like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat grew during their early years,” said Vanessa Pappas, the company’s U.S. general manager. Washington Post TikTok producer Dave Jorgenson went from Jared Leto’s basement to famous professional meme maker with dad jokes and pumpkin-spiced Spam. So let’s look at this decision beyond the geopolitical jousting. It’s possible TikTok has changed some of its data practices for the better recently. Brush said that ByteDance committed to paying his firm an undisclosed amount in consulting fees, and that a fuller report of the consultants’ findings was not yet ready for review. TikTok says its U.S. operation doesn’t censor political content or take instructions from its parent company, the Chinese tech giant ByteDance. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) For years, he said, FOSI and other groups tried to contact Musical.ly, to no avail. TikTok also said its security team is led out of the U.S. by an executive who has decades of industry and U.S. law enforcement experience. If you give it permission, it will also grab your exact location, your phone’s contacts and other social network connections, as well as your age and phone number. On July 7, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. was considering banning TikTok, and warned it puts “your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.” On July 10, the Democratic National Committee cautioned staffers about using it. Welcome to Small Talk, a series where we catch up with the internet's favorite Extremely Online individuals offline. “It doesn’t appear that TikTok takes more data than Facebook but they do take measures to hide what they are collecting,” Jackson said. About 51 minutes. #washingtonpostpeepschallenge | 72K people have watched this. Ask us. The research firm Ghost Data, conducting an analysis of millions of accounts for The Post, found that TikTok is quickly becoming a major rival to Instagram: Users with followings in the thousands appear to watch and interact with content more than similar users on Instagram, and TikTok is becoming competitive even among the influencer set. The broader concern is that China could collect personal data about millions of Americans — one reason TikTok is banned for use on official devices by the U.S. Army. TikTok denies that. (@washingtonpost) on TikTok | 36.5M Likes. Top TikTok executives declined to be interviewed for this article. How The Washington Post became a TikTok hit When you say the name The Washington Post you don’t automatically think of 15-second viral dance videos and haiku challenges. My general privacy rule is: When in doubt, fib. The GNI does annual checkups of its members, including Facebook and Google, to ensure they’re keeping their promises. To answer that, we need to follow the data. Following those rules often sparked clashes within the organization, former U.S. employees of the company told The Washington Post. Neither had seen the Washington Post TikTok account. “I always feel like an adult playing basketball with middle-schoolers,” he says. But its happy-go-lucky rise was largely shaped by its Beijing-based parent company, which imposed strict rules on what could appear on the app in keeping with China’s restrictive view of acceptable speech. https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/07/media/tiktok-washington-post Jorgenson films on his iPhone and uses Premier Pro to perfect timings and add text, then creates special effects in the app before posting. Personal technology and geopolitics are becoming increasingly intertwined: Last summer, there was a similar privacy freakout over the Russian-made FaceApp, a program that takes photos of people and “ages” them using artificial intelligence. Privacy concerns have been the most viral aspect of the popular short-video social network in the past week. But TikTok is hardly the Chinese government’s only way to gather information about Americans. They have been one of the most successful brands on the app, garnering just under half a million followers and over 20 million likes since they joined in … But former U.S. employees said moderators based in Beijing had the final call on whether flagged videos were approved. There’s no reason to give TikTok your real name or access to your contacts or other social media connections. WaPo will track how many users sign up from specific URL sites, but not share that with the newsroom. Read more stories like this on INSIDER. Welcome to Small Talk, a series where we catch up with the internet's favorite Extremely Online individuals offline. The Washington Post launched its own account in May, two months after Jorgenson pitched the idea to his bosses. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.). TikTok star Charli D'Amelio is photographed in the backyard of her home in Norwalk, Conn., on May 7. (The same day, Amazon also told employees to stop using the TikTok app on work phones — but later said that order was sent in error. This senator wants lawmakers to stop pretending we do. TikTok says user data is stored only in the U.S. and Singapore. TikTok is trying to thread a difficult needle as a China-owned app that doesn’t have to play by China’s rules. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, Technology columnist based in San Francisco, Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding their own experiences. The company “is operating under a political censorship regime,” he said, and “the Chinese government has no problem telling [its companies] where they should come down in political debates.”, ByteDance executives said TikTok stores all U.S. user data in Virginia and Singapore. TikTok said it was an anti-spam measure, and has updated the app to stop it. The Post TikTok takes a kind of perverse pride in its unhipness and the fact that by the time a 141-year-old newspaper stumbles upon something that’s become popular on social media, its involvement is inherently comedic. I also asked TikTok some pointed questions about its data practices. The Washington Post’s TikTok reporter Dave Jorgenson posted this incredibly offensive video mocking Georgia voters ahead of the two Senate runoff elections in January. These aren’t scenarios rendered by a magic realism bot, they’re videos rendered in short form on the Washington Post’s TikTok account. Why the fuss? But that’s not what former employees of TikTok say," said Hawley, citing The Post’s reporting. In practice, that means TikTok cannot easily access real-time information about extremist content going viral. When offered a viewing, they watched a clip of Jorgenson “time traveling” in a space suit to tell the future of TikTok —it’s the video pinned to the top of his Twitter feed. “In order to disrupt hackers and those who wish to manipulate the app, we use obfuscation to help reduce automated attacks, like bots,” Nash-Hahn said. Yet, thanks to the passion and vision of one man the venerable newspaper now has a hugely popular TikTok account, which has raked in 644,000 followers since its launch last year. 6.8M Fans. Unlike other events that get memed, an attempted coup that involved at least four deaths and politicians fearing for their lives doesn't really make for laugh-out-loud jokes. — Washington Post TikTok Guy (@davejorgenson) August 21, 2019. Moderators, for instance, were told to restrict any videos showing a person vaping normally, out of health concerns, but to allow the “vaping tricks” that had fueled a viral meme. ByteDance said then that the rules were a relic of TikTok’s early days when the company took “a blunt approach” to minimizing conflict, and that they had been retired in May, after the app had been downloaded more than 100 million times in the United States. In a statement, Pappas said, “Alex has been clear that my team and I have a large degree of autonomy, and full autonomy on decisions like content moderation.”. When you say the name The Washington Post you don’t automatically think of 15-second viral dance videos and haiku challenges. For now, The Washington Post's TikTok is full of goofy clips that highlight Jorgenson's "dorky dad" humor, in hopes of reaching its young demographic through relatable memes. And political content — even if it included constructive discussion, and didn’t touch on China-related topics — was also restricted in case it contained inflammatory talk or controversy. Watch short videos about #washingtonpostpeepschallenge on TikTok. For now, The Washington Post's TikTok is full of goofy clips that highlight Jorgenson's "dorky dad" humor, in hopes of reaching its young demographic through relatable memes.