TikTok’s Black Box Obscures Its Role in Russia’s War

Earlier this month, researcher Cameron Hickey found he could not expand his flock of TikTok bots, because his method for logging into newly spawned accounts was blocked by the platform.

“This research is fraught,” says Hickey, director of the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, a research project at nonprofit the National Conference on Citizenship. “But it’s critical when you’re trying to understand the impact of the TikTok algorithm on what people are seeing.”

Wire.com | March 2022, Tom Simonite