Spies and Spooks have a new lethal weapon: Short Video Platforms

-- By PushkarChaubal - 23 Feb 2024

How incensed would we be if our parents, friends, or lovers divulged our deepest and most intimate secrets?

Millions of Americans voluntarily use platforms from Bytedance, Meta, and Alphabet. According to Meta, it's raison d'etre is to help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. In doing so, these companies harvest our preferences and emotions, the very essence of our unique beings, and sells them to the highest-paying bidder.

It is no secret that tech companies have been abusing our data and rendering 4th Amendment protections virtually useless. However, motivated parties, such as marketers and governments, have even more reason to rejoice. The advent of short-form video platforms have made consumers even more attached to their mobile devices. While 50-second dances seem cute and unassuming, they are Bigtech's newest, and most insidious, tool to learn our inner preferences more deeply and keep consumers glued to their platforms.

Short Video Platforms are the Insidious New Offspring Birthed by the Attention Economy

The Attention Economy Gives Rise to Perverse Incentives

Gone are oil and gold as the most sought-after commodity in the world.With endless amounts of content available, technology and media companies are competing to grab our attention. The more viewers a platform can collect, the more attention is sold. This translates into substantial revenue from advertisers and data brokers.Tech platforms like Instagram and Tiktok can sell data elements such as which photos we like, how much time we spend on a website, what we search, and what files we download. 89% of marketers say that Instagram is strategically important to their influencer marketing strategy.

With so much money to be made and to meet Wall Street’s insatiable demand for higher returns, tech companies are pushed to make their cocaine-like digital drugs even more addictive. Just as PepsiCo spends $700 million annually on R&D to make Cheetos more enticing, Bigtech companies aggressively update their platforms with features that increase the amount of time users spend on their app. To increase revenue, it would seem that the perfect elixir for tech companies would be a product that maximizes the amount of time its users’ eyeballs are stuck to the screen, combined with a mechanism that scrapes their deepest consumer preferences, political ideologies, and fundamental desires. That perfect elixir is short-form video platforms such as Bytedance’s Tiktok, Meta’s “Instagram Reels,” and Alphabet’s “YouTube Shorts.”

Increased Time Spent on the App

Short video platforms feed on our inherent urge for newness. The platforms target our reward systems by featuring 15-60 second snippets of content with bright colors, catchy music, and other eye candy. The constant flow of content creates a dopamine-driven feedback loop, making it hard to stop. The platforms are designed to be endlessly scrollable, with no “tracker” or “progress bar” to tell you how many videos the user has viewed, not unlike casinos lacking windows and clocks. The app “trains users to constantly look for new stimulation.”

Learning Intimate Details about Users

The secret sauce, however, are the platforms’ dynamic algorithms that quickly understand which content that users are most likely to engage with. In a WSJ investigation, over 100 bot accounts watched 100,000 videos on Tiktok. Within just 2 hours of “normal” use, the app had accurately learned the “personality traits” the investigators secretly assigned the bots. The study demonstrated how Tiktok learns our most hidden interests and emotions and drives users into the radicals of content making it hard to escape. The algorithm learned the bots’ vulnerabilities much faster than other platforms. By gaining a deep understanding of their users, the app pushes people to more extreme content that reinforces their worldview, thus keeping viewers engaged for longer amounts of time than other types of social media. One can only imagine how valuable this deep understanding of users could be to advertisers and foreign governments.

Even before short-form video platforms, a 2015 study revealed how algorithms can predict more about a person's personality than their loved ones can. It only takes data on 70 “likes”, 150 “likes”, and 300 “likes” for an algorithm to out-predict a user’s friends, family, and spouse, respectively. With exponential advances in machine learning since then, it follows that algorithms can likely predict human personality with far fewer data inputs.

Compounding the issue, Meta’s “Ads on Reels” program encourages content creators to make videos as eye-catching as possible, with creator revenue directly tied to user engagement with content – as measured by likes, comments, and views.

Our Intimate Details are Sold, Stolen, and Seized Like Commodities

Data Elements are Collected and Shared

With tech platforms harvesting vast amounts of deeply accurate personal data derived through short-form video platforms, it is natural to wonder how our data is processed. Data elements “traditionally” collected include contact information, call logs, photos, videos, and documents. However, the stakes are even higher now with Tiktok and Meta harvesting deeply intimate psychographic data.

A study in 2018 found Facebook gave 61 3rd party companies the ability to access wide-ranging details about users' friends. A close look at the platforms' terms reveals that these platforms can track location through IP address even when users specifically restrict access to GPS. App data is also shared between affiliates which can include other apps the platform is associated with. Additionally, when firms like Amazon and Apple share user data with third parties, users are bound by the terms of those third parties. When such detailed information is collected from the likes of Tiktok and Instagram Reels, these lax data sharing policies need to be all the more scrutinized.

Tech Companies Routinely Comply with Subpoena Requests

Most of the data collected by Bigtech companies are available for use by law enforcement. The most common and basic request is a subpoena, which can grant the government access to meta data, email addresses, billing location and IP address. Apple and Microsoft routinely comply with subpoenas – in the first half of 2020, Apple complied with 44% of ~6,000 government requests by turning over actual content data.

With Bigtech's storied history of sharing data to both commercial third parties and the US government, it begs the question of the extent to which our psychographic data, harvested from the learnings of short-video platforms, is being reviewed by unfriendly actors. The future looks dire.

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