A video streaming app owned by China’s ByteDance, TikTok, has stepped up its competition with other social media giants by introducing a new feature that allows text-only posts.
This addition offers users “another way to express themselves” alongside their usual photo and video posts. Recently, TikTok entered the music streaming market, launching TikTok Music as a rival to platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
The app now provides three posting options: photos, videos, or text. Users can also customize their text posts by adding sound, location, or Duets, which are video reactions to other users’ posts.
“These features make it so your text posts are just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post,” TikTok said.
According to TikTok, these new features make text posts as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post.
In addition to music streaming and text posts, TikTok has been testing other features, including a landscape mode with select users worldwide.
In 2021, TikTok became the world’s most popular online destination, surpassing even the US search engine giant Google in terms of hits. The app boasted more than one billion active users globally that year.
As the competition between social media firms intensifies, companies like Instagram owner Meta and Elon Musk’s rebranded Twitter platform, X, have been making significant moves.
Meta’s Threads platform, for example, quickly gained over 100 million users within five days of its launch in 100 countries.
At the same time, Twitter underwent a logo change, replacing the blue bird branding with a logo featuring a white X on a black background. Additionally, Mr. Musk mentioned that the term “tweets” will be replaced with “x’s.”
The video-sharing app plans to add two more data centres in Europe, according to a senior executive.
According to a senior executive, Chinese social media companyTikTok plans to open two more data centres in Europe, which could allay worries about the security of user data and lessen regulatory pressure on the business.
TikTok has been attempting to reassure governments and regulators that users’ personal information cannot be accessed and that its content cannot be altered by the Chinese Communist Party or anyone else working for Beijing.
According to Rich Waterworth, general manager of operations for TikTok in Europe, the short video-sharing app wants to increase the amount of data it stores in the continent. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
“We are at an advanced stage of finalising a plan for a second data centre in Ireland with a third-party service provider, in addition to the site announced last year,” he said.
“We’re also in talks to establish a third data centre in Europe to further complement our planned operations in Ireland. European TikTok user data will begin migrating this year, continuing into 2024,” Waterworth said.
The company on Friday also reported on average 125 million monthly active users in the European Union between August 2022 to January 2023, subjecting it to stricter EU online content rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The DSA labels companies with more than 45 million users as very large online platforms and requires them to do risk management, external and independent auditing, share data with authorities and researchers and adopt a code of conduct.
The European Commission had given online platforms and search engines until February 17 to publish their monthly active users. Very large online platforms have four months to comply with the rules or risk fines.
Alphabet provided one set of numbers based on users’ accounts and another set based on signed-out recipients, saying that users can access its services whether they sign into an account or when they are signed out.
It said the average monthly number of signed-in users totalled 278.6 million at Google Maps, 274.6 million at Google Play, 332 million at Google Search, 74.9 million at Shopping and 401.7 million at YouTube.
Earlier this week, Meta Platforms said it had 255 million average monthly active users on Facebook in the EU and about 250 million average monthly active users on Instagram in the last six months of 2022.
US Senator Chuck Schumer stated that a proposal to outlaw TikTok in the US “should be looked at.”
“We do know there’s Chinese ownership of the company that owns TikTok. And there are some people in the Commerce Committee that are looking into that right now,” Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News in a Sunday interview. “We’ll see where they come out.”
US lawmakers Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, and Angus King, an independent from Maine, said Friday they had reintroduced new legislation that aims to ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless it cuts ties with its current owner.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, one of the most valuable private companies in China.
US officials have raised concerns that China could use its laws to pressure TikTok or ByteDance to hand over US user data that could be used for intelligence or disinformation purposes.
Those worries have prompted the US government to ban TikTok from official devices, and more than half of US states have taken similar measures, according to a CNN analysis.
TikTok has previously pushed back on the claims, saying it doesn’t share information with the Chinese government, and that a US-based security team decides who can access US user data from China.
The company did not immediately respond to a new request for comment on Monday morning Asia time.
TikTok’s Singaporean CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is slated to testify before Congress in March, on topics including TikTok’s privacy and data security practices, its impact on young users and its “relationship to the Chinese Communist Party,” according to a House committee statement.
“We hope that by sharing details of our comprehensive plans with the full Committee, Congress can take a more deliberative approach to the issues at hand,” the TikTok spokesperson.
Some of the ads include descriptions of sexual violence, paired with images of battered women and photos of male fitness influencers, which were used without permission.
Apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent have been running hundreds of ads on Facebook and Instagram containing sexually explicit content, descriptions of graphic violence, and content promoting acts of self-harm.
The ads, which violate Meta’s policies, contain excerpts from erotic web novels featuring young adult fantasy themes like werewolves and vampires, often paired with short videos and images that appear to be taken from influencers, movies, and TV shows. With descriptions of sexual assault and images of distressed women and girls next to muscular men, these ads push users to download apps where they can pay to read stories by the chapter.
One ad, teasing a story about a “night of terror” where a teen girl will be “mated” to a “creature,” featured a shirtless photo of Brazilian football star Neymar mashed up with a stock image of a beaten woman. A representative for Neymar told Forbes the image was used without permission.
The ad was for iReader, an app into which TikTok’s parent company ByteDance invested $170 million in 2020. As of Saturday morning, 83 other live ads for iReader featured a story chapter titled “His Personal Cum Bucket” and a graphic description of sexual violence. Multiple requests for comment sent to numerous iReader representatives went unanswered.
Ads for the Mytopia app, which is owned by ByteDance, contained similarly troubling content. Three ads for the app included a text description of a teen girl being molested by her step-brother, and three other ads contained a romanticized account of a teen girl cutting herself. After being contacted by Forbes, ByteDance paused Mytopia’s ad campaign, and ByteDance spokesperson Billy Kenny said that the ads “do not match our values.”
Ads paired excerpts of violent erotica with images of distressed women and girls and muscular men, which were sometimes used without permission. Note: some images may be disturbing.
On Wednesday, an app called Webnovel, which is owned by Tencent subsidiary China Literature, began running ads featuring sexually explicit comics that implied incest between a mother and her son. China Literature stopped the ad campaign when contacted for comment by Forbes. In a statement, spokesperson Maggie Zhou said: “We can confirm these ads were posted by third-party agencies without informing China Literature and in violation of our content policies.”
ByteDance (which owns TikTok) and Tencent (which owns WeChat and some of the most popular videogames in the world) have long struggled to show that their products do not expose people to content promoting sex, abuse, or self-harm. But while the Chinese tech giants have invested heavily in removing this kind of content from TikTok and WeChat, they have at the same time paid for erotic web novel businesses to create it and promote it to Meta users through ads.
Meta, for its part, has appeared largely incapable of halting this flood of violent fantasy erotica ads that violate its rules. The company’s Ad Library reveals that while Meta has detected and removed dozens of these ads, advertisers have just put more up. Moreover, Meta’s detection appears weak and haphazard, with weeks-old ads still live featuring text that obviously violates its rules. Before Forbes contacted Meta about the ads, searches of the Ad Library for phrases like “his cock” and “rape me” returned hundreds of results, nearly all of them ads for web novel apps. (Disclosure: in a past life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)
Ads paired excerpts of violent erotica with images of distressed women and girls and muscular men, which were sometimes used without permission. Note: some images may be disturbing.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company had removed dozens of ads from web novel companies before it was approached by Forbes, and that it has removed nearly 200 ads and pages since being presented with our findings. Still, five new renditions of the “cum bucket” ad began running last night from a page that Forbes had flagged to Meta, and a quick search of the Ad Library returns hundreds of similar results.
Apps like Webnovel, Mytopia, and iReader have boomed during the pandemic. The apps first became popular in China, where ByteDance’s Tomato Novel app has been downloaded more than 60 million times. But they have recently become popular in the U.S., too. iReader was downloaded 1.5 million times in 2021, and Webnovel was downloaded more than 2 million times in 2022, according to Sensor Tower. Although Chinese apps dominate the sector, domestic apps offer similar wares: Amazon’s Kindle Vella features identical themes and even some of the same stories featured on other apps. It does not appear to advertise on Facebook or Instagram.
Earlier this year, the Rest of the World reported that the profit margin for China-based web novels is often very high, with companies making as much as 10 times as much as they pay authors for each story. But that profit margin may depend in significant part on ads: In 2021, Protocol reported that 42.7% of China-based web novels were introduced to overseas readers through advertising.
This market also extends beyond just apps backed by Tencent and ByteDance. Last week, Forbes identified more than 1,000 ads running from more than 100 Facebook pages representing China-based web novel apps. Some of the ads stayed within bounds, offering largely standard romance novel fare, but others violated Meta’s policies barring explicit sexual content.
One ad running on Thursday morning promoted an app called MoboReader and described a scene in which a woman’s husband tries to kill her by hitting her with a car, and then another man subsequently rapes her. Moboreader did not respond to a request for comment.
A text excerpt used in at least 32 other ads on Thursday included a graphic, romanticized description of a teen girl engaging in self-mutilation after being abused. The ads were for Supernovel, an app whose Terms of Service claim it is owned by Cloudary Holdings, a subsidiary of Tencent. When asked about the app, Tencent and Cloudary denied any relationship to it.
In 2019, the China-based blog TechNode reported that a ByteDance web novel app popular with domestic Chinese audiences was shut down for three months by the Chinese government for distributing “lowbrow and sexually suggestive content.” But as the web novel industry has grown, ByteDance and Tencent have deepened their investments in it.
In December 2019, ByteDance acquired a majority stake in MyMind Culture, the parent company behind several Chinese-language novel apps. In July 2020, it bought a 10% stake in Beijing Dingtian Culture Entertainment, which runs similar apps, including SweetRead and DmRead. Later that year, ByteDance paid $170 million for 11% of the China-based e-book company Zhangyue, which makes the iReader app, as well as ForNovel, Novelink, Favoread and Noveltells. In 2021, it launched Mytopia, which, like iReader, is targeted to foreign audiences.
Billy Kenny, the ByteDance spokesperson, said that ByteDance (which invested in Zhangyue through its acquisition arm, Quantum Jump) “doesn’t have any involvement in the product and business strategy of Zhangyue’s global businesses.” Zhangyue, however, told shareholders in April: “Mr. Zhang Chao, head of ByteDance’s novel business department, is a director of the company. The company and Byte have cooperated in various aspects such as content copyright and advertising cooperation.” Kenny did not answer follow-up questions about the nature of this cooperation.
Tencent owns the conglomerate China Literature, which controls the flagship English-language Webnovel app through a company called Cloudary Holdings. Terms of service for a cluster of other apps running ads on Facebook, including iNovel, eReader, SuperNovel, PopNovel, Mobooks and MyNovel, list Cloudary Holdings as their operator; however, Maggie Zhou, a spokesperson for China Literature, told Forbes that the entities are not owned or operated by China Literature or Cloudary.
Ads for various apps also used clips from major movies, including Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics.
Many of these ads also appear to rip content from influencers, television shows, and movies. In addition to its Neymar ad, Zhangyue has also featured images of other celebrities, including Kylie Jenner and fitness influencer Chadoy Leon. Leon, whose image was stitched together with photos of frightened women, told Forbes he had never heard of iReader. “Whoever is using my pictures is using them without my permission,” he said. Jenner’s rep declined to comment on the record.
Ads for Zhangyue apps, as well as iNovel, Supernovel, and others, also used content from major movies, including those from the Twilight movies, Star Wars, DC Comics, and Marvel Studios. A representative from Warner Brothers (which owns DC Comics) said its content had been used without permission; Disney (which owns Marvel and Star Wars) and Summit Entertainment (which owns Twilight) did not respond to a request for comment.
Many of the Facebook pages running these ads also bore signs of ban evasion, suggesting the companies are intentionally avoiding takedowns by Meta. Some apps used intentional misspellings for words that might lead to flags. One ad for iReader described a character by the “visible V running down to his gen.ita1s.” Other iReader-owned pages, including those promoting Noveltells and Novelink, added a letter to profane terms, including bitcch and whoree.
Novel apps have also spread their ads out across numerous pages — a tactic often used by networks trying to ensure that one or two takedowns will not cripple an entire campaign. Ads promoting an app called Noveland have been placed from pages labeled Noveland1 through Noveland8, as well as pages with title variations like Noveland App and Noveland Romance Story. Pages called Noveland11, Noveland12, and Noveland13 were created earlier this month, but are not running ads at this time. Requests for comment sent to Noveland were not answered.
Other ads have come from pages with more colorful names: Some ads promoting iReader were placed from werewolf-themed pages with names like Alpha King, Gamma Fire, and Ugly Mate, as well as pages with nonsense names like Genius Babies and Llj-Hhh. A Philippines-based app called Pinky Novel has been running ads from a page called Kz Car Tint & Accesories [sic], and an app called AhaNovel, has been running ads from a page titled “Raped by Mr. CEO.” (Pinky Novel and Aha Novel did not respond to requests for comment.)
Despite Forbes reporting the page to Meta on Wednesday morning, at the time of this writing, “Raped by Mr. CEO” is still live on the platform today.
No longer live, though, is a page Facebook published in 2021, highlighting Webnovel as a “success story” in advertiser partnerships. Stone did not respond to a question about whether Meta still considers Webnovel a model for other advertisers today.
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