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Wait? Did someone just hack TikTok?

It seems…

Almost every social media in existence, (excluding the tiny ones no one uses), seems to be struggling with a bot problem… Instagram slowed this problem a bit by limiting the number of links you can post to a maximum on one per profile, and TikTok seemingly abolished it all together by restricting all external links, and limiting even the comments to a maximum of 150 characters.

For anyone who doesn’t know TikTok is essentially just a remake of Vine with a clever new AI-powered “For You” feed which does a great job of finding and selecting videos that are relevant to your interests. Super Cool and Super Addictive…

Ok, getting back on topic. Although this makes TikTok an incredibly difficult platform for marketers, it is great for content creators since it prevents the platform from being saturated by big name brands who only care about selling more products.

That being said, last night the growing social media was presumably attacked by a number of bots designed to do one thing and one thing only. This… 😡

And surprisingly we (or should I say I) was one of their targets. 😂

It started about 3-pm on November the 28. Scrolling through my notification feed I see a very strange comment. A single 😡emoji, from a user with no name, no videos, and no profile picture… very suspicious when you stop and think about it…

Unfortunately, I didn’t stop and think, and instead commented back “Why? What did I do wrong?” since this comment was on one of my most popular videos with around 1,000 positive comments and almost 100,000 likes.

Checking back at 10-pm and I finally realized that I wasn’t dealing with an angry mob of people but was instead dealing with a hoard of bots who all like the exact same videos(!) in the exact same order(!) and, for some reason, decided to leave a lovely little 😡emoji on my most popular video.

That night, I reported the incident to TikTok and found no more 😡 when I woke up the next morning, which was a great relief… But it still doesn’t answer two important questions…

Other than spreading hate and making people feel generally unhappy, what was the point of these emoji? Honestly, whoever was capable of doing this would be far better off selling Likes or Followers just like they do on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram rather than sending random 😡 emoji.

The other question is, as a platform powered by AI, how will the 😡 emoji I received affect the future visibility of my videos? Is this actually a viable way of attacking popular accounts on TikTok? We have so many questions and so few answers…

Whatever happens next, it seems that even TikTok can be hacked, which is interesting considering just how quickly the platform is growing. Will this affect the blinding speed at which TikTok is glowing as a platform? Only time will tell…

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