Ice Bucket Challenge 2: Electric Boogaloo
It appears Gen Z has reinvented the Ice Bucket Challenge. Instead of doing it for charity, however, they are doing it for a far nobler cause: TikTok views.
All of the videos can be found under this sound, taken from the early 2000s animated television series Teen Titans. A character turns into a fish and flies (?) into a fishbowl, banging its head on the glass before commenting, ‘refreshing’.
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This could be considered a revival of the Ice Bucket Challenge, or it could be considered the yassification of waterboarding. Take your pick.
I haven’t been doing a fantastic job of keeping up with this newsletter, between working and trying to make TikToks more regularly, but I did want to expand on a TikTok I made last week on the issue of misinformation on the app.
Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, published a report last week that revealed that TikTok is being used as a news source by 28% of young people, and it is the fastest-growing source of news for UK adults.
One statistic that stands out is this:
Users of TikTok for news claim to get more of their news on the platform from ‘other people they follow’ (44%) than ‘news organisations’ (24%).
None of this comes as a surprise to me, thanks to the obscene number of hours I’ve spent on the app, but I think that journalists as a cohort have a long way to go before they really understand how TikTok can be used by news outlets and individual journalists effectively. The Washington Post is the exception that proves the rule; their TikTok team is personable, entertaining, while also remaining informative and accurate — it’s clear they genuinely understand what works on the app and what doesn’t.
One way I think TikTok could be used to great effect by journalists is for fact-checking. Misinformation runs rampant on the app, and as I mentioned in my video, it’s difficult to counter; being a video-based app that encourages users to stay on the app itself, linking to text-based external sources is far more difficult than it needs to be. The fact that users can’t link in comments also makes it difficult to properly cite sources - the amount of effort required to manually copy and paste a comment, removing everything except the URL, just to check someone’s source, means that users aren’t very likely to go to the trouble.
We know that misinformation on social media is a serious problem, but it’s not clear that TikTok takes it particularly seriously. It took the other social media platforms years to take things like anti-vax misinformation seriously, as well as political misinformation; Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns resulted in an increase in vigilance in this area, but by that point, a significant amount of damage had already been done.
TikTok has the opportunity to get ahead of the worst of the misinformation on the app by doing things like employing more content moderators or making it easier to link to external sources, but there’s not really any incentive for them to do so, unless they suddenly decide they care deeply about corporate responsibility. ByteDance might be a little busy right now fielding complaints and concerns about how they manage user data.
I would seriously recommend journalists keep an eye on TikTok for misinformation that relates to their beat — if TikTok won’t do anything to combat it, perhaps individual journalists can do our part to fact check where possible. The ease with which blatantly false information can go viral on the platform, however, means that once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s incredibly difficult to get it back in.