Breaking down TikTok

The enduring popularity of TikTok, and the battle over its ownership, has kept the social media platform in the news. In the latest episode of our Ask the Experts podcast, we speak to two OHIO faculty members about the issues surrounding the controversial app. 

How does its proprietary algorithm work? How will the app’s ownership impact its users’ data privacy? How do free speech debates factor into the conversation? And how is it shaping how Americans get their news?

To explore these questions (and more!), we spoke to Chad Mourning, assistant professor of computer science in the Russ College of Engineering and Technology, and Benjamin Tetteh, assistant professor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. 

Mourning helps us understand TikTok’s algorithm and the data security issues surrounding its ownership, offering the example of video manipulation.

“If [scammers] have your videos, it is so easy to train a deepfake on your voice and face now,” Mourning says. “…Instagram offers that as a service. If you're a big Instagram person and you post a video, you might get a pop-up that says, do you want us to make this multilingual?”

The platform can perform a deepfake to mimic the user’s voice speaking another language and change the video so their mouth matches the words spoken.

“The technology is cool because it enables stuff like that,” Mourning admits. “But at the same time, now a scammer… can call your grandmother and say, ‘hey, I'm in jail.’”

Tetteh further discusses how data is collected and protected across the world, and how the news “bubbles” created by social media algorithms can allow disinformation to flourish. But Tetteh points out that social media is still in its infancy.

“It's still like a project,” he says. “What is clearly concerning is how profit is driving a motive, clickbait being a big concern. And I think if there will be a way to resolve that, we can then genuinely say that this can be a platform for debates, a platform for conversation.”

Listen to the full TikTok episode of our Ask the Experts podcast 

Produced by Ohio University’s Communications and Marketing Department, specifically by junior audio production student Alex Karan, the Ask the Experts podcast celebrates interdisciplinary collaboration and is recorded in OHIO’s podcast studio in the Scripps College of Communication.