TikTok / ByteDance

Research shows AI accounts are gaining millions of views on TikTok by spreading dubious health advice Misleading health claims online pose a “huge danger to public safety”, experts have warned, after research has shown that AI-generated doctors are gaining millions of views on TikTok by spreading dubious health advice. The British Medical Association council deputy chair, Dr Emma Runswick, flagged the risks posed by AI accounts that “peddle medical myths and promote so-called miracle cures”. Con

As social media companies face scrutiny over addictive design features, mental health experts cite a stream of breakup content as an example of the failure to protect users.

The European Commission on Friday said it found TikTok had not adequately protected children’s privacy rights on its platform by allowing adults to view the accounts of minors. The action exposed children to cyberbullying, unwanted contact and predatory behavior, commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said. “Children’s content must never be visible to strangers,” he said. If TikTok does not take steps called for by the European Union’s landmark Digital Services Act , “minors are exposed to preda

It was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who wrote in a post on X that TikTok was testing the feature with "some US creators." Source

arXiv:2607.17356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Allegations that TikTok shadow bans political content shape what creators post, what advertisers fund, and how regulators act, yet they are hard to adjudicate because platforms do not disclose how content is ranked. We test the claim with a dense hourly panel of 556,946 follower-normalized views across 2,753 videos from 67 accounts curated into pro and anti sides of three contested topics (U.S. immigration enforcement, Trump coverage, and Israel/

ZTE showcased the NaviX Ultra at the World AI Conference in Shanghai this week, calling it the world’s first agentic AI smartphone. The device, built under ZTE’s Nubia brand, runs ByteDance’s Doubao AI agent and can be activated by voice or a dedicated button. It comes in four colours and was prototyped in December at […] This story continues at The Next Web

“Age checks are a cornerstone of the UK’s online safety laws,” said Ofcom’s Chief Executive, Melanie Dawes. “Too many services have no or inadequate age checks in place, which is not good enough.”

The regulator is assessing whether the platform is doing enough to protect children from harmful content.

Ofcom concerned TikTok’s age verification is ineffective, leaving some exposed to posts on suicide, self-harm and pornography TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it has failed to protect children from harmful content, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, has announced. The social media platform’s approach to checking the ages of users has sparked “particular concerns” at the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst of online content came into effect u

It follows a review by the regulator in May that criticised the platform for not being "safe enough" for children.

The social media platform rolls out new AI transparency tools and education initiatives for South African users.

TikTok's policy chief defended the platform's safety measures as the European Union pushes ahead with restricting children's access to social media.

Climate change is a source of anxiety about the future. Understanding how people express themselves about climate change enables us to address such concerns. To study climate change expression on social media, we analyzed 200 TikTok videos tagged with #climatechange, identifying four categories of content: expression-feelings, views-appeals, news-information, and trend-hijacking. We found that creators use humor to package sharp critiques, avoiding direct confrontation. They replace complex disc

Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues. Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve decided to choose one platform with better privacy practices. With interoperability, you could switch and still interact with

A recent judgment of the European Court of Human Rights concerning a TikTok video published by a Georgian self-defined civil activist adds another layer to the Court’s increasingly messy Article 10 case law. The applicant repeatedly insulted public officials in crude and sexually explicit terms while broadcasting to a large online audience. Domestic courts imposed only a modest administrative fine, later reduced on appeal. The ECtHR did not find a violation of the applicant’s right to freedom of

On Saturday, ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen both announced that their AI agent creation features will be discontinued on July 15, 2026. After the shutdown, users will no longer be able to create new AI agents, while all existing user-created agents will also stop functioning. The platforms said users will still be able to view […]

Personalization algorithms are ubiquitous in modern social computing systems, yet their effects on comment sections remain underexplored. In this work, we conducted an algorithmic auditing experiment to examine comment personalization on TikTok. We trained sock-puppet accounts to exhibit left-leaning or right-leaning preferences and successfully validated 17 of them by analyzing the videos recommended on their For You Pages. We then scraped the comment sections shown to these trained partisan ac

Adolescents spend an increasing amount of their time in digital environments where their still-developing cognitive capacities leave them unable to recognize or resist commercial persuasion. Article 28(2) of the DSA responds to this vulnerability by prohibiting profiling-based advertising to minors. However, the regulation's narrow definition of "advertisement" excludes current advertising practices including influencer paid partnerships and brand promotional content that serve functionally equi