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Yeah, that's my girl In the passenger seat, windows down dancin' around causin' a scene That's my girl sippin' crown and sprite,.
Every night before she goes to bed She hits her knees and bows her head Thank the lord for another day I just thank him for my girl. Yeah, that's my girl In the passenger seat windows down dancin' around causin' a scene That's my girl, sippin' crown and sprite,. In a ball cap turned back ooh she got me like Yeah baby girl you gone and done it again Makin' all the guys wishin' you were with them But I bet they don't see what I see when I see my girl.
That's my girl In the passenger seat windows down dancin' around causin' a scene That's my girl, sippin' crown and sprite In a ball cap turned back ooh she got me like Yeah baby girl you gone and done it again. TikTok did not seem terribly worried about the complaints that followed these deletions. It was now big enough not to care.
A few months after TikTok arrived in the U. Hill, who goes by the stage name Lil Nas X, had spent much of his teens attempting to go viral on Twitter and elsewhere. There is a sweetness to his self-presentation, which seems optimized for digital interaction; he wears ten-gallon hats and fringe and glitter, a laugh-crying-cowboy emoji come to life. The song went to No. Certain musical elements serve as TikTok catnip: bass-heavy transitions that can be used as punch lines; rap songs that are easy to lip-synch or include a narrative-friendly call and response.
A twenty-six-year-old Australian producer named Adam Friedman, half of the duo Cookie Cutters, told me that he was now concentrating on lyrics that you could act out with your hands. TikTok employs an artist-relations team that contacts musicians whose songs are going viral and coaches them on how to use the platform. Some videos include links to Apple Music, which pays artists per stream, though not very much.
Virality can thus pay off elsewhere, relieving the pressure for TikTok to compensate artists directly. If you are one of those people, TikTok can be a godsend.
Troop Capitol Hill. Lifetime of Leadership. My love for you is like diarrhea. Rolling Stone. Because you are my type. Vogue just called, baby! Wrapped together with the standard conflict between mother and father, Mikey engages in a bit of sibling rivalry with his new sister.
TikTok also offers artists the uniquely moving experience of watching total strangers freely and enthusiastically produce music videos for them. ByteDance is developing a music-streaming service—which will likely launch first in emerging markets, such as India—and it is currently negotiating the renewal of old Musical. ByteDance also has acquired a London-based startup called Jukedeck, which has been developing A. Incorporating such technology into TikTok could give ByteDance total ownership of content created within the app. But the app could begin to influence composition in other ways.
Digital platforms and digital attention spans may make hit songs shorter, for instance. Adam Friedman has begun producing music directly for influencers, and engineering it for maximum TikTok success. I suggested that some people might think there was a kind of artistic integrity missing from this process. I visited the office twice this summer, after an extensive e-mail correspondence with a company spokesperson.
The first person TikTok offered for an on-the-record chat was a twenty-year-old TikToker named Ben De Almeida, who lives in Alberta and, on the app, goes by benoftheweek. De Almeida wore red striped pants and a yellow shirt and was accompanied by a handler; he radiated good-natured charisma. When I extended my hand, he immediately went in for a hug. De Almeida was in L.
He used to post videos on Snapchat, but he got on TikTok in November and now has two million followers. In conversation, De Almeida, like other TikTok teens I talked to, mixed the ecstatically strange dialect of people who love memes—a language in which every word sets off a chain of incomprehensible referents—with the sort of anodyne corporate jargon I associate with marketing professionals. Pace wore a charcoal T-shirt and had the erratic energy of a champion sled dog on break.
Pace has fifteen employees working under him to make TikToks, some of which serve as back-end marketing for record labels that have paid Flighthouse to promote particular songs. He was about to travel to New York to present to ad agencies.
Many of the people whose professional lives are dependent on or tied to TikTok were eager to talk to me, but that eagerness was not shared by people who actually work for the company. I asked multiple TikTok employees whether the company did anything to insure that this mood prevailed in the videos that the app served its users. Would you put something else in its place? TikTok employees in Los Angeles declined to talk in any detail about their relationship to ByteDance headquarters, in Beijing, and everyone I spoke to emphasized that the U. Douyin is headquartered in Shanghai, and ByteDance says that it has more than five hundred million monthly active users.
Zhou Rongrong, a twenty-nine-year-old Ph. Though it remains broadly similar to TikTok, Douyin has become more advanced than its global counterpart, particularly with respect to e-commerce. So far, TikTok has concentrated more on expanding its user base than on offering opportunities for e-commerce. If TikTok wants to keep growing, it will need to attract more people who are no longer in their teens, and it will need to hold their attention. Bern thinks that TikTok content will soon become more mature, as has already happened with Douyin, which now contains micro-vlogs, life-style content, business advice, and videos from local police.
Selected users on Douyin can upload videos as long as five minutes. Fictional mini-dramas have begun to appear. Zhang, who rarely gives interviews, was raised in Fujian Province, the son of a civil servant and a nurse, and attended university in the northern port city of Tianjin.
He briefly worked at Microsoft in China, and bounced between startups for a while. He then pitched Chinese investors on the idea of a news-aggregation app that would use machine learning to provide people with whatever they wished to read. The app, called Jinri Toutiao, was launched within the year. Like TikTok, Toutiao starts feeding you content as soon as you open it, and it adjusts the mix by tracking and analyzing your scrolling behavior, the time of day, and your location.
It can deduce how its users read while commuting, and what they like to look at before bed.
It reportedly has around a hundred and twenty million daily active users, most of whom are under thirty. On average, they read their tailored feeds for more than an hour each day.
The app has a reputation for promoting lowbrow clickbait. In China, daily life has become even more tech-driven than it is in the U. The Chinese government has been assembling what it calls the Social Credit System, a network of overlapping assessments of citizen trustworthiness, with opaque calculations that integrate information from public records and private databases. The government has also set benchmarks for progress in artificial-intelligence development at five-year intervals.
Last year, Tianjin announced plans to put sixteen billion dollars toward A. There are two principal approaches to artificial intelligence.
In symbolic A. This works well for things like chess, but everyday tasks—identifying faces, interpreting language—tend to be governed by human instinct as much as by rules. And so another approach, known as neural networks, or machine learning, has predominated in the past two decades or so.
Under this model, computers learn by recognizing patterns in data and continually adjusting until the desired output—a correctly labelled face, a properly translated phrase—is consistently achieved. In this sort of system, the quantity of data is, broadly speaking, more important than the sophistication of the program interpreting it.
The sheer number of users that Chinese companies have, and the types of data that come from the integration of tech with daily life, give those companies a crucial advantage.
Chinese tech companies are often partly funded by the government, and they openly defer to its requests, turning over user messages and purchase data, for instance. Zhang issued an apology, written in the language of government control. Three days later, the Times reported that the Chinese government had deployed facial-recognition technology to identify Uighurs, a Muslim minority in the country, through its nationwide network of surveillance cameras.
In August, I asked a ByteDance spokesperson about the fear that the massive trove of facial closeups accumulated on its various products could be misused. Of course, U. The American system has its own weaknesses. Dinesh Raman, an A.