Influencers are supposed to disclose their ads, but nothing happens when they don't:
In spring 2020, several large, family-friendly TikTok accounts posted videos where they pulled pranks on their friends and family members. They all used toys from Basic Fun!'s Joker Prank Shop line, and all of the videos prominently featured them buying the merchandise at their local Walmart.
The posts sure seemed like ads, but few of them indicated that their creators were paid to promote the toys to an especially vulnerable audience: kids. Many of the creators themselves were kids.
But they were ads, according to Influencer Marketing Factory, an agency that took credit for the campaign on its website and its own TikTok account. [...]
Very few parties seem interested in knowing or following the rules. So much so that a marketing agency seems perfectly comfortable displaying what appear to be violations of them that it helped to create. [...]
This problem isn't unique to TikTok. Instagram has been dealing with it for years, giving brands plenty of time to figure out influencer advertising strategies before TikTok came along. By the time the platform was just a year old, it was already awash in sponsored content — some labeled, some not.
But TikTok's undisclosed ad problem seems to be particularly bad. The app is believed to be especially addictive, with users spending far more time on TikTok than on competitors' apps. And everything is younger: the users, the creators, and the platform itself. TikTok is only now encountering some of the regulatory and legal growing pains its social media platform peers faced years ago.
TikTok is also very popular with a desirable and elusive demographic: Gen Z. And brands know that influencers can be a great way to reach them.
"Gen Z is very predisposed to influencer effectiveness," Gary Wilcox, a communications and marketing professor at the University of Texas, said.
[...] In the end, the real push against deceptive ads may not come from enforcers or the threat of them, but from the platforms themselves. Timelines and For You pages full of shady ads will turn off users, and users are more valuable to platforms than anything else.
"A great way to aggravate your users is to show them stuff that they didn't sign up for and that they don't want," Cutler said. Users don't want to be bombarded with ads, especially when it feels like their favorite creators are trying to trick them, or that the creators are no longer being authentic. These users may not stick around if that's what TikTok increasingly becomes.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday July 17 2022, @08:24AM (3 children)
I don't know how that word ever became something to aspire to. Any toddler who ever made a doodle with crayons or a noodle necklace is a creator. And so am I on the john every morning. Doesn't mean the creation is any good - as evidenced by 90% of the content on any social media site.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by inertnet on Sunday July 17 2022, @12:33PM (1 child)
It used to be that: "what do you want to be when you grow up?", was answered with "fireman, pilot" or some other adventurous profession. Nowadays all you get is: "influencer". 8 Billion influencers, sign of the times.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday July 17 2022, @01:40PM
True. But there is an upside: when the kids of yesteryear who wanted to be a pilot, firefighter or astronaut grew up to become quantity surveyors, accountants or janitors, they realized how shit real life really is.
Kids who want to become influencers however, if they do, they probably don't have what it takes to become anything else. So they'll be happy. And if they become accountants later in life, they'll probably reach the conclusion that it could have been worse and they didn't do to badly for themselves after all. So all in all, with such a low bar, you can never be disappointed.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday July 18 2022, @03:53PM
Have you ever created something just for the joy of it?
Maybe that's enough?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday July 17 2022, @12:41PM
You get more of the behaviors that are rewarded and you get less of the behaviors that are punished.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Gaaark on Sunday July 17 2022, @03:41PM (1 child)
When i see advertisements in tv shows, etc, i call it out: "Advertising!", just to remind myself and others that they're there.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @07:18PM
You sound like a lot of fun. Do you also explain other things unprompted? If so, this [youtube.com] may be for you.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @07:20PM
Show at 11.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snotnose on Sunday July 17 2022, @09:56PM (5 children)
From the few tiktok vids that show up in my feeds, the audience is basically underage girls being sexy. So they are hoping to A) catch pedos; and (forget the OR here, it doesn't apply) B) blackmail the kids once they turn legal.
I can't believe I just referred to young girls as "once they turn legal".
OK, I get it. I'm retired on social security. I've been on the intrapipes from the early 80s. Late 80s/early 90s I had a side hustle (heh, that's actually a perfect phrase for what I did) where I put companies on the internet. Which was basically filling out a bunch of paperwork (via email), sending someone $$$, contacting a guy at UCSD who ran a USENET link (Brian something? He died some 10 years ago), then setting up the client's modem to connect to UCSD several times a day.
That said, back then !foo!bar!destination was the big thing. I was a sysadmin when the first version of DNS came out. Installing it was much like installing LaTeX 5 years earlier. "Do you want to frob your garlicks (y/n)? Do you want to frag your doohickeys (y/n). No clue on what frobs, garlicks, nor doohickeys where. You had to install it, plus figure out who your DNS whatever this new thing is wants to connect to.
After all that, you got to run it, see what errors you got, learn something, and re-install.
I usually got Tex/LaTex in 2 installs, DNS took 3.
Ahh, the retired IT guy's version of "get off my lawn". Too bad that due to the drought it more like "quit stirring up the dust".
/ really miss LaTex, it was so much easier than MS Word
// then again, I have a brain
/// and to my chagrin, usually use it to make people around me make bad choices
What is the relevance to this post after the first 2 paragraphs? Potato water. Very bad potato water combined with Bloody Mary mix at 50% off I got at the grocery store yesterday. Sorry about that.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @11:06PM (1 child)
LaTeX is alive and well, my friend. I use it all the time in RStudio.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2022, @10:46AM
What is the use of RStudio other than making you less productive?
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday July 18 2022, @01:47PM (2 children)
TikTok's algo is exceptionally good at narrowing in on the types of videos a person likes by the way they interact with them (how long they watch, how many times they let it loop, how fast they swipe away, favorite, follow, etc). It makes Google's Youtube look primitive by comparison. So if that's what's showing up in your feed, well, you might want to ask why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 18 2022, @04:00PM (1 child)
Why? Because millions of other people ("training data") are exactly like you. You're not special.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday July 18 2022, @11:41PM