By skyforbes 
I just love it when corporate employees accidentally tell the truth on camera. You know what I mean, like someone is slipping on a banana peel. But the banana in this case is called capitalism and the someone is a multi-billion dollar company I call TrickTalk.
What happened?
More rants after the messages:
Join me and Eliska Went coming Friday, September 5th when we show you how to create your own automated AI tool to find, write and apply for jobs. Register here. Here, I mean: here
- Comment, or share the article; that will really help spread the word 🙌
- Connect with me on Linkedin 🙏
- Subscribe to TechTonic Shifts to get your daily dose of tech 📰
- Visit TechTonic Shifts blog, full of slop, I know you will like !
TikTok employees casting themselves for a career switch
Maybe you’ve heard of it, or not, but North Carolina decided to sue TikTok last year because someone had finally noticed that teenagers are glued to their phones the same way that barnacles are stuck to a ship. The state’s former Attorney General Josh Stein, along with his attorney general buddies from other states — said “Hey TickTok, your app is crack for kids and you know it”.
TikTok, naturally, tried to sweep some internal videos under the carpet, that show employees spilling their guts on the highly addictive nature of their own creation, but on Tuesday, Superior Court-man Judge Adam Conrad was like “Um, nah, we won’t have non-o-that. The people deserve to see this mess”m and he ripped the envelope and unsealed the footage. He also told TikTok to stick their motion to dismiss in a place where the sun doesn’t shine (the legal version of it anyway).
So, here you go. . .
The video is a greatest hits compilation of TikTok employees having those “Are we the baddies?” moments during internal meetings.
Take Nicholas Ka-Chng* was working on risk detection before he grew a conscience and had e-nuff of it all, and he basically admitted to having “(we) built an online slot machine and gave it to kids. Whoopsie Daisy!”, that’s my translation of it anyway, but the man is somewhat higher up the food chain and he still has some form of corporate pride in him, so his real explanation was more in the lines of “umm, unfortunately, some of the stuff, uh, that people find interesting are, uh, not always the most healthy, um. We do, in a way, encourage, uh, some of this content being put up just, uh, because of the way the platform is designed. And sometimes I worry about that, um, yeah, that’s kinda like, uh, um, the truth”.
In my minds eye, I can see a drop of sweat running down his temple [and he also kinda sounds like Butt-head]
Coming up next is Brett Peters, who currently has the title “giving global head of creator advocacy and reputation” (which sounds like a ‘job’ you made up when you couldn’t decide what it is you actually do), and he explained Tok’s business model with, hmm, moderate refreshing. . . honesty.
“Literally, that’s like why we’re all here is to help continue to diversify the content ecosystem, to make TikTok a place where you can get so much different types of content that you never want to leave”, the man said — sounding like an AI on Xanax [and maybe he was — a deepfake — who can tell these days? Certainly I can’t].
I do appreciate his candor though.
Most companies dance around this stuff, but Peters just straight-up said “Our job is to make sure that you never leave”. Now doesn’t that sound eerily like Eagle’s Hotel California “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”? And I must say, this is very much in line with the original narrative of the song, with checking out meaning something like “getting out of rehab or prison for doing drugs“ or something along those lines. Both are very much dopamine inducing anyway.
What was TikTok’s response to all-o-this?
Of course, TikTok, doing the TrickTalk, called the video “misleading” and threw around a few heavy words like “shameful” and “manipulation”, and their spokesperson even said these were just innocent conversations from five years ago when they were tiny babies learning how to make a social media platform.
Aww chucks.
So cutie-wootie.
But the current North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson wasn’t buying it one bit. “These videos prove what we have argued in court, which is that social media companies are keeping kids hooked to maximize profits, even at the expense of their health”, is what the man said. Basically that’s the grown-ups’ way of saying “I told you so”.
TikTok fired back by listing their 70-plus safety features for teens and families.
Dawudnow?
TrickTalk and safety measures?
Hell yeah, when did they release those?
They said TikTok‘s got default privacy settings, they turn off late-night notifications (like letting you scroll until 01 AM is “we care about your sleep, child”), and they even added a “guided meditation” feature.
Uh-huh, right. . . Like offering meditation on the very app you’re trying to escape is a good example of a “please stop using our app” safety measure.
The really spicy part of the video features a miss called Alexandra Evans, who used to run TikTok’s safety public policy (aww, that’s like getting paid for doing nothing!), and being responsible for the country called Europe before she moonwalked out of TikTok back in 2022. I did some checking on her background and she actually is a lawyer who — previous to TikTok — was highly committed to bake children’s data rights into UK law, and she defended free speech, and all that other bureaucratic jazz.
She didn’t mince her words “I think that the reason why kids watch TikTok is that the algorithm is really good. It’s not because we’ve tried to do anything horrible, but I think we need to be cognizant of what it might mean for other opportunities”. And when she says opportunities, I hope she means sleeping and eating and moving around the room and looking at somebody in the eyes, you know, like being social — that sort of stuff. She admits
So basically she’s saying their algorithm is so good it’s preventing basic human functions. But hey, at least they didn’t mean to be horrible!
Then there’s Ashlen Sepulveda, who worked in trust and safety until 2021 and also couldn’t sleep at night knowing how its algorithm worked [and of course because she slept during the day]. She worried about users searching for mental health content and getting served increasingly problematic stuff. “For example, the more that a user looks up things about, like fitness or like diet, it turns into losing weight, and then, soon enough, the entire feed of this user is like soft disordered eating behavior that is being discussed by their peers with no opportunity to remove themselves from that”, is how she explained it.
Peters also admitted that his company goals and good mental health don’t exactly go hand in hand “We have these expectations and goals, and they’re not necessarily congruent with good mental health.”
At least he’s honest about it.
Most companies would’ve said something like “We believe our engagement metrics align with user wellness objectives” or some other corporate nincompoopishness.
TikTok tried to keep this video sealed to protect their employees’ personal information (uh-huh), but Judge Dredd** [Conrad] said that a little embarrassment doesn’t trump the public’s right to know what’s going on.
Hell yeah! Good one, you’re a true Republican Hangin’ Judge!
All this drama is happening while TikTok is still playing chicken with a potential US ban hanging over it’s kyphotic hump. El Presidente Trump has delayed enforcement of the sale-or-ban law until September 17, and that is coming up fast. The Orange House even launched an official TikTok account this week, which — to me — feels very much like your parents joining the very social media platform they’re threatening to ground you from.
In any case, the Chinese government hasn’t exactly been eager to approve any sale of ByteDance’s prized possession abroad, so we’re all just waiting to see if TikTok will still exist come fall, and until then, North Carolina wants unspecified financial penalties and a court order telling TikTok to knock off the allegedly deceptive practices.
Well, if they’ll get it remains to be seen, but at least we got some entertaining employee confessions out of the deal.
Now, what’s the moral of the story? I dunno.
Sometimes the most honest thing a company can do is accidentally admit they designed their product to be irresistible. Too bad it took a lawsuit to get them to say it out loud.
Signing off and spending some well earned time on Faecesbook now,
Marco
* No spelling error, but irl he doesn’t sound like a cash register — but he prolly made a huge buck working at TrickTok nonetheless. Confession time: I just made that up.
** ‘Interesting’ melodrama by Rambo — the C-64 game was waaay better though!
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins.
Think a friend would enjoy this too? Share the newsletter and let them join the conversation. LinkedIn, Google and the AI engines appreciates your likes by making my articles available to more readers.