The followers flocked. Then the tastes. Then tens of thousands of people watched my TikTok video. The clip itself from some motherboard staff members gaining a fit in the incredibly popular game Call of Duty: Warzone; TikTok is full of streamers and players who download their victories or lose their souls.
The video itself is not smart: there is no neat editing, there is no captivating personality of TikTok talking to the camera and there is no dancing; However, in a few hours, the video has accumulated 25,000 perspectives and more than 1,000 likes. That’s very little compromise compared to the most popular videos on TikTok, but that’s not bad for my first clip uploaded to the platform. The video has uploaded the ratings of one of the Warzone-related hashtags that other people use for percentages of their games.
But the maxim of that commitment was incorrect. I bought subscribers, likes and TikTok perspectives on an online page that puts them up for sale. For about $50 in total, I had artificially inflated the popularity of my TikTok clip and, in fact, my video is not about to go viral, potentially increasing the chances that unsuspecting TikTok users will see it themselves.
The news comes amid increased attention to TikTok, adding unverified claims through the Trump administration that the app poses a national security risk. Last week, President Trump signed an executive order banning TikTok in the United States if the company is purchased through a U.S. company. TikTok plans to sue starting this week, NPR reported. Microsoft is in talks to buy TikTok.
The acquisition of subscribers, likes and other commitments in TikTok highlights the grey market for social media amplification; a challenge that is not unusual on social media in the broadest sense. The commitment we paid for didn’t turn the video or account to viral, and we don’t know if a TikTok video can go viral with a not-authentic commitment alone; We only acquire a relatively small amount of participation. But paying for participation in TikTok is simple and cheap. Nine days after paying for subscribers, the account and video are still active, undetected through Tiktok.
“Likes, crawls and paid actions on any platform are necessarily a set of numbers. They can do a publication more than they would otherwise, and that can give it an air of credibility,” Ben Nimmo, director of disinformation research. Corporate security Graphika, told Motherboard in an email.
Painting in TikTok? Are you used to doing that? We’d like to hear from you. Using a non-professional phone or computer, you can safely tap Joseph Cox on Signal on ’44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on [email protected] or send an email to [email protected].
With TikTok, users create an account, maybe look for certain topics that interest them, and then they are presented with an endless stream of short clips to watch. Once users interact with this content, perhaps watching the clips to the end, liking the videos, leaving comments or sharing them with others, TikTok temporarily and appropriately determines what other videos to recommend. These then appear in the sequence “For You”. TikTok differs from many other social media paintings in that it does not paint on a so-called social graphic that recommends content to users based on who they follow, but on a content graph, which examines other signs, such as user viewing time. videos or in a different way committed to them.
To see how undeniable it is to buy TikTok share parts, last week I downloaded my Warzone clip on TikTok, then bought 250 subscribers on the online page that pronounces the service. After specifying the number of subscribers I wanted, offering my account call and adding the item to my shopping cart, I paid a little over $12 through PayPal. The site also accepts Paytr, Stripe and other payment processors for a cheaper price.
The effects were subtle. I won 250 new subscribers a few seconds after making a payment. The subscribers I bought were a wide variety of accounts claiming to be women, men and many users with profile pictures of things like animals or even, in one case, a PC graphics card. Some have notoriously generated usernames such as “user2299926539189”, others have full names like “Pauline Chavez”.
“Looking at some of the accounts you submitted, they don’t seem very high quality, but they don’t seem very poor quality for fake accounts,” said Zarine Kharazian, assistant editor of the Digital Forensic Research Laboratory (DFRLab), which searches for misinformation online, the motherboard said in an email after reviewing some of the purchased subscribers. “High quality would be something like previous user compromised accounts with a full post count, while low quality would mean no customization.”
These accounts are somewhere in between, with profile photos, and some also had biographies and their own video downloads. A clip is a typical chat video that you can see going viral (although the video appears to have been taken from a chat-centric TikTok account that shared the same video a month earlier). Another set of at least 3 accounts contained generic photographs of female models as profile pictures. These accounts each had a video uploaded with a Google Image screen searching for effects from the same models. All videos showed an Internet browser with the same language markers, suggesting that videos posted through multiple accounts that we paid to support us were created through the same person.
Many of those fake subscribers I paid for had the same TikTok accounts. A user who joined many accounts I paid to stay with me was a young woman from TikToker with 2.2 million subscribers. Another account registered through many fake fans belonged to a UK skills explorer. It is not transparent if suspicious accounts adhere to those users to provide their own accounts as authentic TikTok users, or if account owners also purchased subscribers or liked them. Several TikTok creators crawling suspicious accounts did not respond to multiple comment requests; One user who answered the young TikToker’s call said the user had just turned thirteen and didn’t have a chance to buy anything. Many fake subscribers also like videos from many of the same accounts.
A representative of visitors to the Motherboard online page used to acquire TikTok’s commitment refused to answer questions about how the service manages to execute orders, either by using hacked accounts, creating their own accounts and whether they use some kind of automation to like videos or track accounts. .
“Sorry, I can only answer questions about our customers’ orders. Thank you for your and have a good day,” the user replied in an email. In particular, his reaction also included the date and time in Turkish.
DFRLab had discovered in the past several programs that promised TikTok’s commitment to changing high-level access to users’ phones, adding contacts.
Over the next few days, I also bought 1,000 likes and 25,000 perspectives for my video, which came in a matter of minutes. To verify whether those purchases had a tangible effect on video visibility, a member of Motherboard’s staff scrolled through a Warzone-related hashtag and discovered the video successfully. In general, TikTok videos that seem to be the most sensitive to the hashtag have more likes than the videos below. Motherboard discovered our verification clip among other videos that also had about 1000 likes (some of the most productive videos on the hashtag have around 500,000 likes). TikTok told Motherboard that videos under a hashtag are not just taken care of according to tastes, but a mixture of other participation bureaucracies, such as perspectives and relevance.
It’s hard to tell if any of those un authentic commitments led TikTok users to watch the video in their “For You” feed. The video gained more than 1,100 perspectives after Motherboard stopped buying for an un authentic commitment, however, it’s not clear where the prospects came from, “For You,” when browsing the Warzone-related hashtag, or some other way.
“Buying a commitment to TikTok can magnify the content, it’s complicated to say precisely how without knowing more about the details of TikTok’s advisory algorithm,” added DFRLab’s Kharazian.
Nimmo added: “If a tweet or message has 1,000” like “or ” actions,” it will instinctively be more impressive than a message with zero. Similarly, an account with 100,000 subscribers will appear more popular than a ten account. But it’s largely a cosmetic effect: it can make a post or a user popular, but it can’t make them popular.”
“If you can use fake accounts to create a publishing trend and therefore build the algorithm, this can simply catch the attention of genuine users, if they are looking for the trend theme. At this point, it’s a matter of using fake accounts. to idiot the trending algorithm, that idiotic human users, ” said Nimmo.
A non-authentic activity is not limited to TikTok. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other social networks have focused more on detecting and deleting non-authentic accounts, specifically in recent years. Some campaigns have focused on PR agencies that sell lies on behalf of customers; governments spread divisive messages, or political scientists do the same.
“Can I stand out by TikTok?”
In a blog post published last July, TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer wrote, “We, that all corporations deserve to disclose their algorithms, moderation policies, and knowledge flows to regulators. The first step in launching a center of transparency and accountability for moderation and knowledge practices. Experts can practice our moderation policies in real time, as well as read about the genuine code that drives our algorithms.” On its website, TikTok states: “Due to the limitations of the coronavirus pandemic, the physical openness of our Transparency Center and responsibility has been delayed. We look forward to welcoming short-term or long-term visitors to Los Angeles and our next Center for Transparency and Accountability in Washington DC.”
“TikTok is committed to protecting the security, integrity and authenticity of our network,” a TikTok spokesperson told Motherboard in an email statement. “We use a combination of technology-based security controls and human review to mitigate spam and fraud on our platform, adding purchase or like subscribers, which is a violation of our network rules, and we take quick action against accounts that violate our terms. to understand that spam and fraud are evolving threats across the industry. Array TikTok will continue to invest in responses to our security infrastructure and will continue with those challenges.”
In the days after the acquisition of 1000 likes, TikTok seems to have suspended some of the accounts.
“This account has been banned due to several breaches of network rules,” a banner now says about the accounts involved. However, the maximum number of accounts is still active and the video itself has a counter of more than 1000.
The user’s video that had many suspicious accounts following them said, “Can I still be known to TikTok?”
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