1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

[TikTok / LLM Analysis] Last week at AI Forensics we published a report on what #TikTok|s For You feed looked like if you where interested in a global news event like the Nato Summit end of June. We show how the feed favors engagement baiting and conflict […] [Original post on chaos.social]

[Mention of Kirk incident on TikTok] TikTok seems to be largely failing to prevent the spread of videos from the shooting for Charlie Kirk. One video has more than 13 Million views already. People see this in their feed and seem to struggle with it. These are […] [Original post on chaos.social]

[Problems with YouTubes Search API] I'm mostly complaining about TikToks API, but it seems YouTube is not much better. It's hard to use for replicable research results, researcher found: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11727

[TikTok Research API - No Update] A month ago we showed how many videos are missing from the #TikTok Research API, rendering it useless for many purposes. https://aiforensics.org/work/tk-api We set up a dashboard to monitor improvements. If you didn't check […] [Original post on chaos.social]

[TikTok Account Dataset published for BTW2025] We've just published a list of 2344 #tiktok accounts from political parties and candidates: https://osf.io/6gn8x The list is a collaborative effort of multiple researchers including University of Potsdam and IDZ Jena as well as independent […]

[TikTok Ad Library minor fix] TikToks Ad Library has many problems which the European Commission is now finally investigating. And it seems to have an impact. Somebody spent 5 minutes to fix one of the annoying usability issues. The default date of the search […] [Original post on chaos.social]

[TikTok & Data Access / Tech Policy] I've been working with #tiktok data for some time now. But what never helped, was trying to use the data access methods they are offering. Together with other researchers we've now summarized our complaints […]

At AI Forensics we monitored the polish election and found a) #tiktok is still bad at labeling election related content, and b) there were several election fraud conspiracy theories that were not labeled and were seen by millions of people: https://aiforensics.org/work/tiktok-polish-elections

In February 2024 our team at then SNV published a report on the #tiktok Ad Library and it's short comings: https://tiktok-audit.com/blog/2024/Tik-Tok-oclock/ Today the European Commission announced that their investigations, which included an interview with us) also conclude that the ad library […]

Trying to work with TikToks Virtual Computing Environment (VCE). Requested data on 10(!) Videos.. 20 minutes passed. still waiting.