Web novel apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent are running hundreds of Facebook and Instagram ads showing sexual assault, violent erotica, and acts of self-harm (Emily Baker-White/Forbes)

Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
Internal meetings: TikTok employed a two-tiered moderation system with “more lenient” treatment for influencers, celebrities, and other VIPs with 5M+ followers  —  Content from accounts with more than 5 million followers has been routed through a designated, “more lenient” …

Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
Sources: ByteDance launched audits into TikTok’s global CSO Roland Cloutier before he quit, hamstringing his efforts to build a robust security team  —  Roland Cloutier, a U.S. Air Force veteran and former law enforcement officer, stepped down as TikTok’s Global Chief Security Officer …

Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
Docs: a China-based ByteDance audit team planned to collect TikTok location data of US citizens who had never had an employment relationship with the company  —  The project, assigned to a Beijing-led team, would have involved accessing location data from some U.S. users’ devices without their knowledge or consent.

Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal:
A look at the increased use of celebrity deepfakes in advertising, with or without their permission, raising legal and ethical questions  —  Digital simulations of Elon Musk, Tom Cruise, Leo DiCaprio and others have shown up in ads, as the image-melding technology grows more popular and presents …

Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post:
Sensor Tower: Tencent earned $4.4B revenue from its apps in H1 2022, the highest globally; ByteDance was second with $1.3B, demonstrating China’s market power  —  Tencent Holdings and ByteDance were the world’s top-ranked companies by app revenue in the first half of 2022, according to a new report …

Rashi Shrivastava / Forbes:
An investigation shows how self-publishing platform Wattpad’s lack of moderation, age verification, and safety features helps sexual predators exploit teens  —  For many teenagers, the reading and writing platform is a creative and educational outlet.  But a Forbes investigation found …