TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and another $100 million after an order vacates an earlier consent decree against its predecessor company, Musical.ly.
Teens are using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to secretly film classmates and teachers at school, with the harassment disproportionately aimed at girls. Much of the footage stayed online until Futurism contacted Meta and TikTok directly.
TikTok is laying off 75 workers in the Seattle region, focused largely on the company’s e-commerce business, according to a notice filed Tuesday with Washington state.
Job titles listed in the notice are almost entirely TikTok Shop and Global E-Commerce roles in Bellevue, Wash., including anti-fraud and governance program managers, seller and creator operations staff, campaign managers, data scientists, and backend and frontend engineers.
The notice Tuesday was filed by TT Commerce & Global Services LLC on TikTok letterhead, and lists two ByteDance employees as contacts. It gives the affected facility as Lincoln Square North at 700 Bellevue Way NE, with a separation date of Oct. 19.
TikTok Shop is the company’s in-app shopping business, which lets brands and creators sell products directly in TikTok videos and livestreams. The company has used the Seattle region as a base for the e-commerce push, expanding its Bellevue offices as it built out the business.
GeekWire has contacted TikTok representatives for comment, and asked for details on the size of the company’s remaining workforce in Bellevue and the Seattle region.
The cuts follow TikTok’s announcement on Aug. 6 that it will close its Nashville office and lay off all 250 workers there, most of them on content moderation teams.
Hidden code in TikTok's iPhone app hints at a DM payment feature powered by TikTok Pay, the tool already used for TikTok Shop purchases in parts of Asia.
Birdwatching is finding a younger audience on TikTok, where millions of views are helping Gen Z discover birds, wildlife and an increasingly popular outdoor hobby.
A blurry TikTok clip of a fish coming out of a borewell led scientists straight to a brand new species living underground beneath the India-Nepal border. Meet Gangaichthys indonepalicus.
Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors and OSINT investigators!
Today, we’re diving deeper into the world of social media OSINT, focusing specifically on TikTok. What started as a simple short-video app has rapidly transformed into a major global player, boasting over one billion active users who are constantly creating, sharing, and engaging with content at an unprecedented rate. While many view TikTok purely as a source of entertainment, this article will uncover how we can leverage various tools to gather valuable insights, including location data, network connections, and metadata. So, let’s get rolling!
Step #1: Decoding TikTok URL Metadata
Let’s dive into our first tool, Unfurl. This tool wasn’t created specifically for TikTok, but it’s useful for quickly gathering basic information about videos. Its name perfectly describes its purpose: it unfurls or unravels URL structures to uncover the valuable information embedded within them.
When you share a TikTok video, the URL carries much more than just a simple link to the content. TikTok encodes identifiers, timestamps, and metadata right into the URL, often in formats that aren’t easily decipherable at first glance. Unfurl takes these URLs and translates the embedded data into clear, visual formats, making analysis much more straightforward.
The interface is simple. Paste any TikTok video link into this field and click the Unfurl button. The tool processes the URL and generates a tree diagram showing all extracted metadata.
The screenshot above shows that we have extracted the video ID, a unique identifier assigned to each video on the platform. Additionally, the author’s username and timestamps embedded in TikTok URLs indicate when the content was published. Unfurl processes these timestamps from their encoded formats and translates them into easily readable dates and times.
It’s very simple, but it can sometimes be useful when doing an investigation. Just paste the link, and you’ll get the date and time.
Step #3: Gathering TikTok Account Intelligence
Let’s shift our focus to account-level insights rather than just individual video metadata. To do so, there’s a website called omar-thing.site that can help.
To begin, simply enter the username of the account you wish to explore and submit your query.
The results start with the avatar, which can be downloaded for further analysis. The account name and display name are extracted separately.
The account location is shown as the country where it was registered or where TikTok believes the user is based, in this case, Belarus. The account’s language is also listed.
Below that is the bio (blurred here due to ads), followed by key stats and details: the permanent user ID, creation date, dates of any username changes, and whether the account is private or public.
At the bottom of those details, we can find lists of followers and of those being followed. We can click to explore them further or download the information for analysis later.
Summary
By using a few simple tools, you can uncover a wealth of valuable information from TikTok. This article serves as a starting point for exploring this social media platform not just as a source of entertainment, but also as a treasure trove of insights.
If you’re looking to enhance your OSINT skills beyond just using these tools, consider exploring OSINT training. If you need assistance in uncovering the truth, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hackers-arise@protonmail.com, and we’ll conduct a comprehensive OSINT investigation for you.
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