For years, TikTok has described its powerful For You Page as a personalized feed ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app. But that’s not the full story, according to six current and former employees of TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, and internal documents and communications reviewed by Forbes. These sources reveal that in addition to letting the algorithm decide what goes viral, staff at TikTok and ByteDance also secretly hand-pick specific videos and supercharge their distribution, using a practice known internally as “heating.” “The heating feature refers to boosting videos into the For You feed through operation intervention to achieve a certain number of video views,” an internal TikTok document titled MINT Heating Playbook explains. “The total video views of heated videos accounts for a large portion of the daily total video views, around 1-2%, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics.” TikTok has nev...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared in federal court in San Francisco on Friday defending tweets he posted to his tens of millions of followers in August 2018 for a such agreement has been "confirmed". Trading in Tesla stock initially stalled after the tweets, then the stock fluctuated wildly for weeks. Musk later said he was in discussions with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund and was confident the funding would come at the proposed price. An agreement never materialized. The SEC charged Musk and Tesla with civil securities fraud following the tweets. Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million in fines to the agency and reached an amended settlement that required Musk to temporarily step down from his role as Tesla's chairman of the board. His 2018 tweets also sparked a shareholder class action lawsuit from Tesla investors. They allege Musk's tweets mislead them and say that relying on his statements to make deals cost them a significant amount. The shareholder transactio...