TikTok Made Fake Accounts with Content from Instagram and Snapchat

buzzfeednews.com

8 pointscscurmudgeon2 comments

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

TikTok is worth ripping for many things, but I find this kind of outrage to be a bit artificial.

What social media company didn't bootstrap with some kind of self-created profiles sometimes with some kind of borrowed content?

IMO, most dating sites launch with hundreds of hot profiles pre-seeded with profiles managed by the creating team just to solve the chicken and the egg problem.

I believe that Reddit famously created a bunch of fake accounts and started dumb fake conversations just to launch the site and portray some activity.

I'm sure real-estate sites violate terms of service to get their initial houses listed to have any content on their site.

I think this happens to some extent with most sites with user-submitted content. Is anybody under the illusion that this doesn't happen?

What does that have to do with anything? No one is under the illusion that it never happens that someone bootstraps a bike shop by driving around the neighborhood stealing peoples bikes. That doesn’t make it right though.

Obviously the content was valuable to tiktok in that early phase, so they owe a lot to the content creators they ripped off.

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