In a prank commenting on bad traffic in Cape Coral, Florida, Paxten Sester and his buddies passed time during a long red light by playing Uno in the middle of the road. Dylan Kjos caught the minute-long gag on video for TikTok and its since gone viral.

"(After a minute,) we rushed back into the truck, thinking that the light was about to change. And we still sat in the truck for about another minute," Kjos said.

According to UPI, "Kjos and his friends said they were aiming to poke fun at the local traffic, which they said is particularly slow during the winter.

Read the rest

@_leilanaatry this! #foryoupage #airpods #seeya #WhatsYourStuf #officelife #makethisviral

♬ The Box - Roddy Ricch

Trade an Airpod with your friend. Pop it in your ear. Use a text-to-speech program like Google Translate to "talk" to your friend across the room during the class, without ever having to open your mouth.

I don't know if this is legit, but either way, it's brilliant. Read the rest

Follow @artist_munda on TikTok to see his amazing work sculpting realistic clay heads.

Skills from r/BeAmazed

//embed.redditmedia.com/widgets/platform.js Read the rest

The US Navy has issued a policy banning the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the China-owned video messaging service is a “cybersecurity threat.” Read the rest

The increasingly popular social media application TikTok has a concerning relationship with the Chinese state. That link became ever the more concerning today, when reports began circulating of a brand new partnership between the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, and the government of China. Read the rest

Yesterday Bytedance, the company that acquired the tween-centric app Musica.ly and relaunched it as Tiktok, was been sued by a parents' group for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by gathering, storing, and selling private information about their children. Today, they settled the case on terms that have not been disclosed. Read the rest

China-based technology company ByteDance is on a charm offensive, reports Reuters, ramping up efforts to distance its popular social app TikTok from the rest of its Chinese operations. Read the rest

An American teenager's clever TikTok video managed to sneak in banned commentary on the topic of China's concentration camps and torture programs for Uighur Muslims. The teen's video was bookended with beauty tips, and went viral with 1.4M+ views and ~500,000 likes. Many copycats. China didn't like it. Read the rest

I imagine that many of these videos were originally filmed by parents disappointed in the outcome, only to be rescued by teens who realized their failures could be spun into gold:

There's more sports bloopers under #highlightreel at Tiktok. Read the rest

"OK boomer" is an all-purpose rejoinder for millennials and Gen Y/Zers who are accused by their elders of eating too much avocado toast, wanting a participation trophy, or of miscellaneous snowflaking. Read the rest

Bart Baker is a YouTuber who specialized in vulgar videos and pop-star parodies, but his income withered when the site demonetized all the horrible things we didn't realize our kids were watching. So he's abandoning his 10m subscribers there to focus on conquering Chinese social media instead. Baker's even learned enough of the langage to pander to its nationalist vanities and bottomless consumerism, which Vice highlights in this 7-minute interview.

Now, Bart’s days start with live chat and song sessions with his millions of Chinese followers on Kwai, a Chinese social media app. Then, his Chinese manager sends him a Chinese song, which Bart translates into English, with the help of Google Translate. Hours later, Bart’s English version of the track is burning up the top ranks in Douyin (China’s version of TikTok).

Bart sees immense potential in the Chinese market, and has already announced that he is quitting YouTube. Meanwhile, his Chinese manager is concerned that Bart’s American persona could be trouble in China, if it isn’t properly handled.

I liked his boss in Shanghai, who knows two things: that westerners who can speak Chinese are a media gold mine, but also that it's likely they will eventually utter something offensive to Chinese authorities and get everyone involved in trouble.

Right now Americans are fascinated (and appalled) by how quickly the progressive ethics of large corporations (Apple, the NBA and Activision-Blizzard) are being switched off by Chinese power and money. But Baker is a sign of what's to come: American kids blathering in machine-translated Mandarin about the superiority of China, happy to humilate themselves for a little money and fleeting attention. Read the rest

Play YMCA (or some other song) with your friends, turn around, and see which face the camera focuses on.  There are plenty of compilation videos featuring people playing for minor rewards like loser buys dinner.  But as these clips show, some people have played for high stakes indeed:

THIS TREND IS SO GOOD pic.twitter.com/K2iWUwZTMW

— Rohan Kumar (@rohanrkumar) September 30, 2019

(Via Taylor Lorenz.) Read the rest

Tiktok bills itself as apolitical, despite the fact that is both a de facto arm of Chinese political propaganda (and, weirdly, for Uyghur human rights activists). Read the rest

In July, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg held two hour-long internal employee meetings to discuss the business's future; The Verge obtained the recordings of those meetings, which reveal, among other things, that Zuckerberg dreads the possible election of Elizabeth Warren (Warren has pledged to break up Facebook and its Big Tech competitors if she becomes President in 2020). Read the rest

Tiktok (formerly Musica.ly) is the massively popular, $75b social media sensation primarily used for short lip-sync clips with high-precision choreography and endlessly inventive special effects and video techniques. Read the rest

It's been a year since Chinese social media giant Bytedance relaunched its super-popular app Musica.ly as Tiktok; the company is now valued at $75b, and in the USA it has become a serious challenge to US-based social media companies, courting a young audience (so young that it's getting into legal hot water over it). Read the rest