The 188th Block: TikTok, trends, and the price of privacy
Wrapping up the year—part one of... a few, I guess?
This week…
Your reading time is about 7 minutes. Let’s start.
The week Spotify Wrapped was released, I read an article or something (a tweet? a thread? maybe it was a TikTok?) about how someone’s Wrapped was ruined. No, not because of the kids.1 Rather, their top song was the same one song that was automatically queued at the end of any playlist or album they were listening to. This writer/social media user said that Spotify’s algorithm has messed up their Wrapped because the app kept pushing that SAME ONE SONG. Does anyone know the original link to this post? I didn’t imagine it, did I?
Plus, I wonder if this dissatisfaction is more widely felt. Do you have any strong objections to yours? My top song of 2023 was “Special Occasion” by Emily King, although I thought it would be “From Gaza, With Love” by Saint Levant since my wife wouldn’t stop playing it when we do our weekly house cleaning. It is probably worth noting that “Special Occasion” is the song that comes right after Saint Levant’s in my playlist. My top artist was Stromae, even though not a single one of his songs was my top five songs.
Beyond this, I should probably refrain from disclosing too much about my listening habits. I know privacy scholars warn against the normalisation of surveillance capitalism, or just of the general creepiness of using big data analytics this way. Plus, they didn’t pay Jewel Ham a single cent!2
Anyway, I’m not big on year-end roundups—and I’m sure you’re also probably already sick of them—but I’ll share a few trends I noticed:
English Wikipedia’s most popular article of 2023 is ChatGPT.3 We are a chronically online generation.
Oxford’s word of the year is “rizz” (this word gives me the ick) but Cambridge Dictionary’s is “hallucinate,”4 in reference to AI hallucinations, while Merriam-Webster’s is “authentic,”5 driven by conversations about AI and influencer culture. We truly are a chronically online generation.
That letter to America did not make TikTok’s top 2023 trends6 after all. In fact, I do not recognise a single trend on this list, and I’m on that app a lot. See Mia Sato’s article below for an explanation.
Language is political, evidenced if not by the bullet points above then by Duolingo’s 2023 year-end review.7
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
ICYMI: The Previous Block was about a couple of big babies. CORRECTION NOTICE: None notified. TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen
Mia Sato for The Verge:
Until today, I’ve seen zero of the top 10 videos, and besides [Selena Gomez], have only encountered one of these creators. In my corner of TikTok, none of these are viral—we don’t even know they exist.
As I wrote last year when TikTok released its 2022 recap, counting down the top-performing content illustrates just how disparate our individual experiences are on one of the most influential platforms of our age. What I’m seeing on TikTok isn’t necessarily what you’re seeing—and according to this recap, the overlap is slim between my For You page and the net average of all TikTok users. How do we make wide-ranging conclusions about an app where a consensus doesn’t exist? And what counts as “viral” on a platform where anyone can rack up half a million views and it would still be a drop in the bucket of attention and not at all representative of “what’s happening on TikTok”?
Like the author of this article, I too have seen zero of the top 10 videos. Where is the fruit-peeling content? The Francesca Albanese fan cams? The rugby highlights?
Mexican politicians are harnessing Swiftie fandom on TikTok
Daniela Dib for Rest of World:
Cristian Edgardo Guerrero Flores, who goes by Cristian Magazo on social media, is a Mexican TikToker who posts about legal inquiries. In mid-2022, the social communications team of Mexico’s Supreme Court hired him as a digital communications consultant. Within a few months, the country’s chief justice, Arturo Zaldívar, went on TikTok to announce that he was a Swiftie, or a fan of the U.S. singer and songwriter Taylor Swift. The video garnered over a million views. Soon, Zaldívar’s TikTok account was filled with Swiftie content: He congratulated her on her birthday, shared his Swift-heavy Spotify playlist, and exchanged friendship bracelets with the singer during the Mexico City leg of her Eras Tour.
The new approach was a hit: Zaldívar soon came to be known as Ministro Swiftie—Swiftie Minister—in Mexican media.
I mean, I wouldn’t vote for someone just because they, too, are a huge fan of Stromae, but that’s just me.
Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos
Benj Edwards for Ars Technica:
On Wednesday, Meta released a free standalone AI image-generator website, Imagine with Meta AI, based on its Emu image-synthesis model. Meta used 1.1 billion publicly visible Facebook and Instagram images to train the AI model, which can render a novel image from a written prompt. Previously, Meta’s version of this technology—using the same data—was only available in messaging and social networking apps such as Instagram.
If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, it’s quite possible a picture of you (or that you took) helped train Emu. In a way, the old saying, “If you're not paying for it, you are the product” has taken on a whole new meaning.
The price of privacy is €9.99 a month8 and all your public images.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading On Palestine (2015) by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé.
I’m listening to CBC’s Front Burner with Daemon Fairless in conversation with 404Media’s Jason Koebler on the 23andMe data breach.
I’m watching a Sirul Azhar Umar exclusive on Al Jazeera’s 101 East with Mary Ann Jolley.
Other curious links, including en español et français:
“The two Chomskys” by Chris Knight (University College London) for Aeon.
“How conspiracy theories can affect the communities they attack—new research” by Daniel Jolley (University of Nottingham), Andrew McNeill (Northumbria University), and Jenny Paterson (Northumbria University) for The Conversation.
“When research study materials don’t speak their participants’ language, data can get lost in translation” by Sonia Colina (University of Arizona) for The Conversation.
“Israeli tank fire killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah in Lebanon” by Maya Gebeily, Anthony Deutsch, and David Clarke for Reuters.
“The science of late-blooming lesbians” by Alexandra Shimo for The Walrus.
The South Korean woman who adopted her best friend” by Hawon Jung for Al Jazeera.
“Alexa no encuentra su sitio en la fiesta de la inteligencia artificial” por Carlos del Castillo en elDiario.es.
« Les micros-trottoirs envahissent TikTok, pour le meilleur et pour le pire » par Stéphanie Dupuis dans Radio-Canada.
Chart of the week
In a Reuters Institute report released this week, Federica Cherubini and Ramaa Sharma showed that media leaders struggle with diversity. The report is based on a survey of 135 news industry leaders from 40 countries (mainly Global North) carried out between 6 September and 18 October.
Among the main findings: When it comes to diversity, 90% of survey participants feel their organisations are doing a good job in gender diversity but numbers are considerably lower when it comes to doing a good job with political diversity (55%), supporting staff with disabilities (54%), or ethnic diversity (52%).
And one more thing
Nieman Lab’s predictions for journalism in 2024.
‘How to Get Your Kids’ Music Out of Your Spotify Wrapped Playlist’. CNET, https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-get-your-kids-music-out-of-your-spotify-wrapped-playlist/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
‘Jewel on X: “I Cant Make This up! Https://T.Co/TMHmNvlztk” / X’. Twitter, https://twitter.com/whateverjewel/status/1334249515000475650. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
‘Announcing Wikipedia’s Most Popular Articles of 2023 –’. Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Dec. 2023, https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/12/05/announcing-wikipedias-most-popular-articles-of-2023/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
‘The Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year 2023’. Cambridge, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/editorial/woty. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
‘Word of the Year 2023’. Merriam-Webster, 26 Nov. 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
‘Year on TikTok 2023: Scroll Back with Our Community’. TikTok, 6 Dec. 2023, https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/year-on-tiktok-2023. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
Cindy Blanco. ‘The 2023 Duolingo Language Report Reveals This Year’s Language Trends’. Duolingo, 4 Dec. 2023, https://blog.duolingo.com/2023-duolingo-language-report/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
‘Facebook and Instagram to Offer Subscription for No Ads in Europe’. Meta, 30 Oct. 2023, https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2023.