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TikTok is the social media sensation that all of Silicon Valley — and a lot of Washington, DC — has their eyes on. The app, created by ByteDance, became famous for rocketing musicians and dancers to stardom. But as its popularity and influence have grown, so has scrutiny of its privacy policies, security, and influence, with legislators voicing concern about its ownership by a Chinese firm. Meanwhile, social media competitors are doing everything they can to knock off TikTok’s features and usurp its short-form video dominance.
Starting today, US users will be able to book hotels, tours, and ticketed experiences directly in the app. Travel content is a major category on the platform, so it makes sense for TikTok to want a hand in the actual booking process, not just discovery. Content creators will also be able to earn commissions from reservations made through their content.
A TikTok spokesperson tells Business Insider that the feature will now identify products in a video, instead of attempting to summarize what happens in it.
Users have reported some wildly inaccurate AI video descriptions, like one that described Charli D’Amelio as a “collection of various blueberries with different toppings,” according to Business Insider.
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) have written a letter to TikTok USDS CEO Adam Presser, urging the platform to estimate users’ age using their account activity or require parents to confirm their child’s age. The lawmakers also suggest that TikTok works with OS-makers like Apple and Google to implement age verification:
For example, if a user is designated as a child in their iCloud account, meaning they are under 13, Apple could share that information with TikTok and the user therefore would not be able to create a TikTok account.
Correction, April 22nd: The name is Josh Gottheimer, not John.
Explosive Media is going up against the White House in a meme war.
TikTok star Khaby Lame sold his personal brand to a small, relatively unknown company called “Rich Sparkle Holdings.” Instead of handing him $975 million in cash, they paid him in stock. Fans piled in, causing the price to skyrocket, briefly making Lame a paper billionaire (several times over) before the price plummeted. It’s now looking suspiciously like a “pump-and-dump” scheme, causing trading apps to freeze the stock. 🤷♂️
The decision reverses a 2024 order for TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, and comes after an agreement that TikTok will implement “enhanced protection” for Canadians’ personal information.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which previously warned against using TikTok, said Canadians should “proceed cautiously” when joining new platforms and “conduct their own research on the type of data being collected,” CTV News reports.
The old sport is going all-in on chasing virality.
A new Sensor Tower report suggests the USDS takeover managed to retain most of its users despite a bumpy start and concerns with the new owners:
The average number of TikTok’s daily active users in the US remains around 95% of its usership compared to the week of Jan. 19-25.
We can confirm that basic features in the US do seem to work reliably now on the new Trump-friendly entity’s servers, even if the algorithm still seems a little wonky at times. Per TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC:
We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary US data center site operated by Oracle. The winter storm led to a power outage which caused network and storage issues at the site and impacted tens of thousands of servers that help keep TikTok running in the US.
Great, but how many of ya’ll have abandoned the platform?
Without explaining why its cloud status page doesn’t list any outages, TikTok USDS part-owner Oracle outed itself as the previously unnamed “US data center partner” that experienced a power outage over the weekend, blocking videos from publishing and unraveling its all-important algorithm for a few days.
Michael Egbert, Oracle Spokesperson:
Over the weekend, an Oracle data center experienced a temporary weather-related power outage which impacted TikTok. The challenges U.S. TikTok users may be experiencing are the result of technical issues that followed the power outage, which Oracle and TikTok are working to quickly resolve.
It follows Snap in reaching an agreement to resolve the first of several cases slated to go to trial this year about social media’s alleged harm to users, an attorney for the 19-year-old plaintiff confirmed. That leaves Meta and YouTube as defendants in the case going to jury selection today.
TikTok’s US service crashed early Sunday morning, and as of late Monday night, it still hasn’t fully recovered.
After finally announcing the problem started with a power outage at an unnamed partner’s data center, TikTok USDS followed up with an updated statement saying, “While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve together with our data center partner,” and listing some of the bugs users are experiencing. There’s still no ETA for a full fix.
Despite claims floating around social media, the truth is a bit more complicated, not least by the fact that TikTok in the US is still largely down, about a day and a half after its data center power outage problems started.
While tweets from random users, the governor of California, and PopBase claimed TikTok US DMs now censor “Epstein,” testing it from our end showed that its messaging feature bans many innocuous single-word messages, like “test.” Using the convicted sex offender’s name in a sentence, however, goes through unbanned.
Oracle and a group of investors now control TikTok in the US, and promise to retrain the app’s algorithm on US user data. Though TikTok blames some of the issues users experienced over the weekend on a power outage, many are still concerned about how their feed could change.
Whether this is just a regular outage or a result of this week’s changes in management, reports tracked on Downdetector and Reddit confirm many people are having trouble loading TikTok right now.
If the mobile app loads, it’s not consistently showing comments or other features, and the algorithm managing the For You page doesn’t feel like it’s working correctly.
Update, January 26th: TikTok is still having problems in the US, which it says are connected to a data center power outage.
