TikTok Increasingly Used as Search Engine; Open Door to More Influence Operations

Search Engine Jour­nal, a US pub­li­ca­tion, is report­ing that Tik­Tok is being increas­ing­ly used as a search engine, even being pre­ferred by some to Google. Accord­ing to the report:

June 17, 2022 Tik­Tok was spot­ted test­ing a new search fea­ture, rais­ing ques­tions about its via­bil­i­ty as a search engine. Inter­est­ing­ly, many peo­ple already use it as one. Accord­ing to a screen­shot shared on Twit­ter, Tik­Tok is start­ing to show sug­gest­ed search terms when view­ing a video’s com­ment sec­tion. To learn more about this fea­ture, I explored Twit­ter to see if any­one else was talk­ing about it. Ulti­mate­ly, I want­ed to answer the ques­tion: ‘What if peo­ple start­ed using Tik­Tok as a search engine?‘ Instead, I dis­cov­ered a whole seg­ment of peo­ple treat­ing Tik­Tok as a search provider, with some even pre­fer­ring it over Google. The ques­tion quick­ly turned from ‘what if” to ‘what now?‘ We’re past the point of ques­tion­ing whether Tik­Tok has poten­tial as a search plat­form. The users decide, and increas­ing­ly turn to Tik­Tok for their infor­ma­tion needs.

Read the rest here.

Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ing to Tik­Tok has included:

•  In March 22, we report­ed that Tik­Tok was fail­ing to con­trol Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da on its platform.

• Lat­er in March 2022, we report­ed on how the Tik­Tok algo­rithm quick­ly directs users to dis­in­for­ma­tion con­cern­ing the Ukraine war.

• In April 2022, we report­ed that Chi­na had qui­et­ly built a net­work of social media per­son­al­i­ties and influ­encers who par­rot the government’s per­spec­tive in posts seen by hun­dreds of thou­sands of unsus­pect­ing Insta­gram, Face­book, Tik­Tok, and YouTube users around the globe.